Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/the-soft-whisper-of-my-inner-voice/

My husband and I consider ourselves to be animal lovers. We have had five dogs over our twenty years together. Four of those have been rescue dogs.

Rescue dogs are often mixed breeds. When adopting one, especially if it’s a puppy, you’re not quite sure what mix of breeds you’re getting. With an older dog, you can normally get some idea of the breeds involved by the look of the dog.

The rescue organisation will try to help as much as possible with their best guess, or based on what the person who surrendered the pups told them, but that’s not always reliable information.

Dogs are driven by instinct which is influenced by their breed. Characteristics that only come to the fore as they mature. It’s better, for the owner and the dog, to work with a dog’s nature and temperament than against it.

Part of the journey with a rescue puppy is that you’ll only discover their innate instincts and characteristics as they mature.

For me, discovering my own nature has taken some experimentation as well.

I felt so different to my family growing up that for years I was convinced that I was adopted. The likelihood of that explanation was dispelled when complete strangers would walk up to me saying, “you must be your mother’s child because you look just like her.” 

Adding to the complexity of me not relating to my relatives was the constant disruptions to my external environment with our regular moving from town to town and city to city. This forced my focus to be on figuring out each new external environment.

Then I repeated the pattern.

It was always assumed that I would study further after high school but, when I thought about the options of what I would study, I couldn’t make a decision. None of the options stood out to me. However, when I thought about travelling and backpacking that really lit a fire in my belly.

So in the middle of my last year of high school that’s what  I decided I was going to do.

My decision was not well-received by my parents. My dad told me that this would be the stupidest thing I’d ever done. My mother told me that I thought I knew everything. I responded, “No, it’s because I feel like I know nothing about myself. I need to find out.”

My inner voice spoke in dissent from the voices around me. It’s the first time I recall listening.

Essentially I was figuring out who I was by comparing myself to those around me. I was looking for some commonalities and, so far in my life experience, I hadn’t found enough to satisfy me.

Travelling helped me with that. A world away I discovered people from all over who thought like I did, with interests that held my attention, conversations that stimulated me. The world I unearthed was big, beautiful, exciting and textured. I blossomed in that environment. In those foreign lands, I no longer felt foreign to myself.

That quiet voice inside me that said, “go, explore” served me well. Distance and new surroundings gave me a new perspective not only of myself but of what was possible.

I decided I liked exploring. I liked travelling.

As most independent travellers will tell you, you can have some of your best experiences when you get lost. The other side of that perspective is that you can also have some of your worst.

In surveying the unknown I discovered lots of good fits for me, but I also found myself lost, turned around, trying to figure out how I got there.