Last Updated on June 6, 2019 by PowersToTravel
My heart races and I see bright flashes of color. I briefly hold my breath and, with my eyes closed, slowly look around. I am experiencing a flash-back. It’s not deja-vu, although truly, I have already seen these visions already.
I am remembering particular, individual moments from my recent travels which simply take my breath away. As a type 1 diabetic, I never believed these moments possible. Other people thought of travel to the moon or Mars as near-impossible dreams, yet they dreamed of them nonetheless. So it was with me, as a teenager with type 1 diabetes, before the invention of the blood glucose monitor, the insulin pump and the continuous glucose monitoring system.
My grandmother, while in her thirties, fell in love with a picture of a beautiful waterfall somewhere in New Zealand, and dreamed of some day seeing it herself. At the time, naturally, she was unable to perform a Google image search to find her waterfall. Finally, at the age of seventy-six, in 1979, she took her entire family to New Zealand, in search of her waterfall. We found Stirling Falls in Milford Sound, on the south island. The tour boat headed north through the Sound and passed the waterfall without fanfare. Suddenly as the boat turned south, her angle of vision changed and her waterfall emerged. She cried.
Stirling Falls – Milford Sound, New Zealand – picture courtesy of Borvan53, unmodified under the license Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
I have, over the course of decades, accumulated many small dreams which I knew were unattainable.
I read of Jane Goodall and her work with gorillas. That would never be me, but still, in my mind I am there in the African brush. I read the book and saw the movie Lost Horizons, and dreamed of climbing the Himalayan Mountains. I saw the pictures of the Great Wall of China from space, and wished I someday might stand on that wall. The list grew year after year.
But now, with my husband, my new mindset, and my continuous glucose monitoring system, I am venturing out to see that which I never believed possible. No, I am not camping in the rough with my gorilla friends, however I am seeing the colors, touching the textures and meeting the people I never thought I could.
