frivolous

Perhaps because I have not been frivolous enough in my life, last night I bought an airline ticket to South America. In keeping with my belief that if you want to visit a foreign country, you should generally skip the big cities -- cities are all the same and it is in the countryside that the small, specific red blood cells of a nation are forged -- my destination was to be 'out there' somewhere ... out where the grass is green, the houses sturdy and a quiet man tended his sometimes-willful pigs or small bank or well-tended church and the world was flat, perhaps. I bought the ticket on the spur of the moment and I was planning to go "now."

As dreams go, this one was flavorful and packed with a wish that is highly unlikely ever to be fulfilled. When awake and when thinking about distant destinations, South America is a place I know little about and as a result have little interest in. Imagine that -- cavalierly writing off a whole continent. But it was that ignorance that allowed me, for a change, to be frivolous ... if only in a dream.

On the one hand, I suppose it takes a kind of courage to be frivolous, to range spontaneously away from terra cognita and into the realm of just do it. On the other, individuals who give over to every whim and whimsey strike me as ... well ... frivolous and weak-tea and probably cruisin' for a bruisin'. I suppose that each side of the coin can look with a wispy longing at its shadowed obverse.

Caution to the winds!

Dive! Dive! Dive!

Trust, leap, let the music take you, giggle within ... and be frivolous!

South America, here I come!

If only in a dream.