A Brave New World
Sonya Lowery's World Next Door Helps Check off Everything on Your Bucket List
By Andrew Hedlund
People looking for adventure or wanting to check items off their bucket list need to look no further than Sonya Lowery, owner and creator of World Next Door.
The Greenbelt-based organization, which was her brainchild, is centered around making the most out of life by going on adventures, big or small. She also films webisodes, or short video clips broadcasted on the Internet rather than TV.
“We try to give people a way to live the best, most fulfilled life,” Lowery explains. “I kind of equate World Next Door to bucketing-listing. We try to get people to live… a little bit of an adventurous life.”
A trip to Italy and skydiving include some of her past adventures. But most of her expeditions are more local and modest in nature. These often include new restaurant visits or taking classes put on by local organizations.
“Most of the time, we do local, little adventures. To me, an adventure could be a brand new restaurant, just tasting something new,” she says.
Lowery’s first adventure, in fact, was visiting a new seafood restaurant, what is now Chef Tony’s in Bethesda, which was owned by one of her friends. “I was trying to be cool on camera, but I burnt my mouth,” she says.
The idea for World Next Door came from her discontent with her life as a graphic designer. She felt “chained to her desk” as a graphic designer and decided she wanted to live life to the fullest, which didn’t include being bound to an office.
“I spent everyday glued to a chair, with no outlet, and to waste away so many years without anything for yourself, it’s okay to find out who you are,” Lowery says. “I think life is to be lived and we should all take a moment to connect with ourselves and other people.”
So, World Next Door was born. It started out as a hobby but developed beyond much of that. She started recording her adventures for her followers and viewers to see. She produces them with the help of her father, a TV news editor for Independent Television News— which is in Washington DC, but based out of London—and her brother, a soundman and cameraman in New York.
Her favorite adventure so far has been skydiving. Initially, the idea frightened her, but she soldiered on, went through with the excursion and ended up loving it.
“I was trying to find reasons and cancel it,” she notes. “I had to push myself; I really had to push myself. I was queasy and my stomach was in knots.”
All that fear went away when the door from the plane opened right before she jumped.
“When they open that door and all you see are clouds, it’s really intimidating,” she explains. “The moment we jumped, all of that went away. You don’t have that feeling of falling like you’d think. It actually just feels like you’re lying on a huge fan.”
Lowery completed the jump on a 90-degree day, but it felt completely different to her at 14,000 feet. The weather, she said, was 40 degrees.
Felix Baumgartner inspired Lowery to push the envelope even more. Baumgartner recently set the world record for highest skydiving jump by completing a descent from 24 miles above the earth.
Now Lowery wants to jump from 30,000 feet, around the average height that some passenger planes fly.
Perhaps the most exciting development for World Next Door is the potential jump from webisodes to TV. “We have not produced (a webisode) lately,” she reveals. “We are working on taking the webisode to television. We are trying for national. We are putting together all our reels we need in order to put our package out there.”
When asked if any TV stations expressed interest, she didn’t tip her hand.
“We are pretty much locked down (on a network) to tell you the truth,” she quips.
Photos courtesy of worldnextdoortv.com
