waiting

I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone.  The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go.  I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageble size.  It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.  If I had been an orchid hunter I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found.  

-Susan Orlean, from The Orchid Thief