For Now, The End of Traveling
Sometimes when I explain to people my plan -- to spend the first two years out of college traveling and volunteering at organizations in developing countries -- people have told me that this is a good idea because then ¨I´ll get it out of my system.¨ Comments like these always make me smile because they allow me to see just how poorly the speaker understands me. My desire to work and study abroad comes from a deeper, life-long yearning to understand and know the world we live in.
But there is a time for everything. And on the eve of my departure, I feel that I am ready to return home for a while. I´m looking forward to studying again in Chicago this fall because I think my course will eventually give me the tools I need to understand the world in a deeper way and one day make a larger impact.
More fundamentally, I know well that traveling is not forever. The genius of it is in coming to a foreign place and seeing it with widely opened eyes. These moments of exploration have such magic in them, a magic that is beautiful because it is fleeting. We are all transitory creatures in this world, but we feel our transitory nature more viscerally in encounters like these. After spending the majority of the past four years doing just this, I am ready to take a break. For a variety of reasons, I feel a bit tired of traveling at the moment, having done much of what I wanted to do here, and am looking forward to being still for a while at home.
The truth is that we will not be given an unlimited amount of moments like this. There are only so many times that you can play frisbee in a park in Benin or fly kites on a rooftop in India with large groups of exuberant children and have it be one of the most joyful moments of your life, for that joy is partially derived from the spontaneity of the encounter. All the times that I met old men on the street and played chess, or had families invite me back to their houses for dinner, or shared a hilarious conversation with a perfect stranger on the bus, were so potent in part because they could not be replicated. I had to live the moment fully lest it be lost.
Over the course of my travels, a great number of kind individuals and families have invited me into their world. It may have been only for an hour, or for a few days, or for a few months. Here in Nicaragua too I´ve been granted that privilege numerous times: to make friends, live with a family, and share some of their world. It´s hard for me to express my gratitude, but this really is the thing that I have wanted most here.
Likewise, over my time traveling, I´ve enjoyed a wide variety of natural pursuits: in the Thar desert and the Sahel, the Himalayas and Fiordlands, along Caribbean beaches and Ganges delta. But one can only so often hike into the crater of a volcano, traverse snow-capped ridges, cut a path through a dense tropical jungle, or stand in the middle of a desert and feel space extend all about you so many times and have it be the most formative experience of your life. Those first encounters are the most precious, because you see for the first time a new wrinkle in this beautiful world, you feel the full force of the land inside you in a way you didn´t quite before. As a kid at summer camp, I feel lucky to have cultivated a love of natural spaces, and so each sunset, mountain top, impossibly starry night, and late evening descending into dusk is special to me.
I´ll take a break now from experiencing these things abroad, but they are indeed all around us in the States, if only we take the time from our busy daily lives to look around and appreciate it. This is something that I think has been a bit of a challenge for me in the past, breaking out of the confines and habits of daily life to find what´s surprising, so I´m looking forward to it now. But just because these moments from abroad have gone and past does not mean that they are done: To the contrary, I carry them with me always, as they have helped forge who I am.
I went back to visit Las Tias this afternoon, the school where I volunteered for two months with at-risk children. I was overwhelmed by the response I got from when I returned: They remembered me well, all our songs and games, and were thrilled to see me. After we had sung and clapped like old times, Cristobal asked me when I´d be returning. It´s a common question I´ve received from my Nicaragua friends in recent days. I told her that I wasn´t exactly sure, but that after my year studying in the university I would have to again decide what I wanted to do. To a nine year old, a year must sound like a long time, and she worried that I would forget her. No, I told her, that´s impossible. I could never forget her, could never forget what we shared here.
But there is a time for everything. And on the eve of my departure, I feel that I am ready to return home for a while. I´m looking forward to studying again in Chicago this fall because I think my course will eventually give me the tools I need to understand the world in a deeper way and one day make a larger impact.
More fundamentally, I know well that traveling is not forever. The genius of it is in coming to a foreign place and seeing it with widely opened eyes. These moments of exploration have such magic in them, a magic that is beautiful because it is fleeting. We are all transitory creatures in this world, but we feel our transitory nature more viscerally in encounters like these. After spending the majority of the past four years doing just this, I am ready to take a break. For a variety of reasons, I feel a bit tired of traveling at the moment, having done much of what I wanted to do here, and am looking forward to being still for a while at home.
The truth is that we will not be given an unlimited amount of moments like this. There are only so many times that you can play frisbee in a park in Benin or fly kites on a rooftop in India with large groups of exuberant children and have it be one of the most joyful moments of your life, for that joy is partially derived from the spontaneity of the encounter. All the times that I met old men on the street and played chess, or had families invite me back to their houses for dinner, or shared a hilarious conversation with a perfect stranger on the bus, were so potent in part because they could not be replicated. I had to live the moment fully lest it be lost.
Over the course of my travels, a great number of kind individuals and families have invited me into their world. It may have been only for an hour, or for a few days, or for a few months. Here in Nicaragua too I´ve been granted that privilege numerous times: to make friends, live with a family, and share some of their world. It´s hard for me to express my gratitude, but this really is the thing that I have wanted most here.
Likewise, over my time traveling, I´ve enjoyed a wide variety of natural pursuits: in the Thar desert and the Sahel, the Himalayas and Fiordlands, along Caribbean beaches and Ganges delta. But one can only so often hike into the crater of a volcano, traverse snow-capped ridges, cut a path through a dense tropical jungle, or stand in the middle of a desert and feel space extend all about you so many times and have it be the most formative experience of your life. Those first encounters are the most precious, because you see for the first time a new wrinkle in this beautiful world, you feel the full force of the land inside you in a way you didn´t quite before. As a kid at summer camp, I feel lucky to have cultivated a love of natural spaces, and so each sunset, mountain top, impossibly starry night, and late evening descending into dusk is special to me.
I´ll take a break now from experiencing these things abroad, but they are indeed all around us in the States, if only we take the time from our busy daily lives to look around and appreciate it. This is something that I think has been a bit of a challenge for me in the past, breaking out of the confines and habits of daily life to find what´s surprising, so I´m looking forward to it now. But just because these moments from abroad have gone and past does not mean that they are done: To the contrary, I carry them with me always, as they have helped forge who I am.
I went back to visit Las Tias this afternoon, the school where I volunteered for two months with at-risk children. I was overwhelmed by the response I got from when I returned: They remembered me well, all our songs and games, and were thrilled to see me. After we had sung and clapped like old times, Cristobal asked me when I´d be returning. It´s a common question I´ve received from my Nicaragua friends in recent days. I told her that I wasn´t exactly sure, but that after my year studying in the university I would have to again decide what I wanted to do. To a nine year old, a year must sound like a long time, and she worried that I would forget her. No, I told her, that´s impossible. I could never forget her, could never forget what we shared here.
posted by Hayden @ 1:00 PM
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