A little dirt never killed anyone.

How traveling abroad for a month taught me that though life can get a little messy, the memories and adventures are worth every single ruined book.

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I traveled to Southeast Asia this year and to say the trip was life-changing is an understatement.

I learned so much about life and about myself during this month-long adventure that I honestly had no I idea I still needed to know.

One of the first things I learned while traveling abroad, is that you can’t expect everything to be neat and tidy. You are constantly on the go, in a different city, a different hostel every few nights and sometimes staying in places that are comparable to that summer camp you went to in the woods as a sixth grader.

Either way, I’m sitting here reading Good Thinking by Guy P. Harrison and looking at the beat up, yellowed pages remembering how this book got so darn battered in the first place.

We traveled to Chiang Mai, Thailand during their New Year celebration called Songkran.

Basically, the tradition for this holiday is to cleanse one another of the past year to start the new year clean.

Well the tradition has evolved and now it is pretty much a nation-wide water fight. I had no idea about this holiday when we stepped foot outside our hostel and made our way to dinner on Friday night.

Charissa and Lili both had a pretty good idea of what was going on, because they had their phones and belongings in those cool new-age clear fanny packs you can wrap around your waist.

Either way, I learned my lesson quickly as we started around the block, and were instantly chased down the street by a group of Thai children with water guns.

We spent the next three days completely soaked. I’m not exaggerating. Everywhere you turned someone was waiting with a bucket of freezing cold water. No worries though, the locals would smile and wave and shout “Happy Songkran” after you were drenched head to toe.

It was a cool tradition to get to celebrate in a foreign country; those three days were filled with lots of laughter and and even more dirty water.

I had been wearing my favorite cross-body Eddy Baur bag that my sweet friend Sydney so thoughtfully bought me for the trip. My passport and phone and other important belongings were all in plastic bags inside of this bag, but my book however was not.

It got wet. I mean really wet.

The bottom right corner of the book is kind of a brownish yellow now, it has doubled in size and its pages are wavy and distorted.

This type of thing used to annoy me. It looks dirty, it looks used and it looks kind of gross if I’m being honest. But, as I flip through the somewhat crispy pages, I can’t help but just smile and remember just how these pages got so worn.

I used to be the same way with my car, I didn’t want a spec of sand to be in my car at the end of the day because it was so clean and shiny and nice.

Those stains in my seats from many fun-filled road trips will come out someday, and though my boon might be a little beat up, it is still very readable.

The memories associated with every single stain, every grain of sand, and every worn, raggedy, yellow page of my books bring me more happiness than the clean,shiny, perfect state they were in when I got them.

Let‘s face it, life gets messy. I’ve never felt dirtier than I did when I was traveling for a month. But there was never a dull moment.

My days were filled with laughter and adventure and with that there was dirt, mud, elephant poop, bugs of all sizes, as well as infected cuts all over our bodies. You can be certain my hair resembled something of a bird’s nest at some points as well—but wow, the memories made and the lessons taken away from that trip are worth every single second of messiness and dirtiness.

Some of my books are a little worn down and the mats in my car are covered in dirt, sand and leaves; but my heart is full of experiences and adventures I will never forget. And that’s worth a little dirt and a little mess if you ask me.