As a northerner, attending NASCAR seemed like a right of passage to permanently living in the south. So I rounded up my friends for a 10 hour marathon tailgate and NASCAR race. After hours of consumption, games, music, and sun, it was finally time for the race. Once we got in, it was super loud and there was no way to communicate with anyone except for exchanging questionable gestures back and forth. That left me hours of watching cars driving in a circle essentially alone. After the long tailgate, it was nothing like I expected. Rather than being some hick sport, NASCAR was an emotional experience for me. Granted, this revelation occurred after ten plus hours of beer and sun, but there was something fantastic happening at NASCAR that night.

NASCAR is what life should feel like. It's intense. It roars. There is so much noise and chaos, but in the end there is an end goal so clear and attainable that it cuts through everything in the periphery. But more than anything, you feel NASCAR. It rumbles your soul and shakes your eardrums until you lose a sense of equilibrium.

And for me, this created the perfect environment to think. I usually don't feel too strongly, so the literal shaking atmosphere of NASCAR got my creative juices flowing. All I could think about were topics worth blogging about. By the time I got home, I had a whole list of topics that inspired me to write, to tweet, and to create.

The juxtaposition between a redneck, beer loving, gas guzzling sport and deep intellectual thought may not seem to make sense on the surface, but on deeper introspection, it actually does. By living your life and experiencing new things, you are opening yourself up to new topics, new thoughts, and new memories. When you go outside of your comfort zone, you end up learning more about yourself.

Maybe NASCAR won't inspire you to write like it did for me, but doing something new most likely will. You never know when you'll get a dose of perspective, so you mine as well take every opportunity to try and see what encourages your passions. You might just be surprised at what comes out if it.