Scenario one: A hazy mist hangs in the air, and there is a certain light falling that wasn’t there when you left home this morning. The mist suddenly becomes a downpour – nature creating a background music of harsh drops hitting the stone street and the rumbling thunder surrounding the city block.

You look up at the rain thinking about the umbrella that is still sitting near the door at home. The skyscrapers’ windows are now draped with streams of rain that carry down to the sidewalk about your feet.

You eventually feel the sense of urgency to cover yourself from the rain, so you wander awkwardly down the street against the current of hundreds of people and their umbrellas, passing corner shops and crossings.

We choose to look at the same piece of technology day in and day out, rather than looking at the millions of unknown explorations that lie ahead.

A sign down the street is lit and you instinctively walk that way, like a moth to a flame. The sign was for a hole-in-the-wall book shop, one you are discovering for the first time. You stop and gaze in amazement at all the stacks and rows and piles of novels with names that have never come up in conversation before.

After some time, you finally feel brave enough to reach for a title that has faded beyond any sort of recognition from the binding.

Hours pass in the little book shop. The rain has cleared, but you find yourself enthralled in the words that make you drift far from anywhere you’ve ever been. It is in that moment when you feel the ultimate tug towards something that is unknown and yet powerful enough for you to realize that this unknown thing has been missing all your life: wanderlust.

Scenario two: You walk down the sidewalk, uniformly with the busy crowd. The mist that hangs in the air turns into a down pour.

Thankfully you woke up this morning with the instinctive need to grab your phone off your bed side table and checked the weather, so you grabbed an umbrella. You pull the umbrella from your things with your left hand, because your right hand is dedicated to holding your phone, to which your eyes are currently glued.

You remain undistracted by the rain and the hundreds of people that meander around you on the city block because the entire world has narrowed into the screen twelve inches from your face.

It is in that moment when you feel the ultimate tug towards something that is unknown and yet powerful enough for you to realize that this unknown thing has been missing all your life: wanderlust.

Because you are preoccupied with your latest social media feeds, you unknowingly pass by the small undiscovered book shop, and instead head down your routine path, towards your routine, everyday coffee shop, probably Starbucks. And you stand in line with the other forty, normal, everyday people, all waiting for the same drink.

You grab your drink with your left hand, your phone in your right, and you go on, living your day like every other day without any sort of wanderlust, all because you made a decision when you woke up in the morning. You choose to pick up your phone and have it never leave your side, rather than choosing to actually live a life that is different from everyone else.

We live in a time when the life of not being connected to technology is essentially obsolete. It seems that when we make this sort of decision, we are also choosing to forgo any sort of old fashioned ways of wandering and the desire to explore into the unknown.

Virtually exploring and sharing opinions on Facebook or Twitter is incomparable to the possible, perhaps scary, beauty that lies beyond our everyday lives.

We choose to look at the same piece of technology day in and day out, rather than looking at the millions of unknown explorations that lie ahead. We choose to uniformly go to Starbucks, rather than venture into that little book shop that could spark a small flame of wanderlust. But tomorrow, you can choose again—and I hope you choose right.

-Ellie Sherwin