My son doesn’t nap, well, he does, but only if I’m holding him. And if he doesn’t sleep he’s able to summon a mood cantankerous enough to cause a cosmic shift. So I hold him in the glider we thankfully bought while he eats, and while he sleeps. At three months old this is probably eighty percent of our day. So I sit in this chair, unable to move or get up most of the time.
The irony of my newfound video obsession is not lost on me, nor is the reason I enjoy it so much right now. While sitting in my chair it gives me a way of dreaming about travel, and remembering that there is indeed a whole world out there, with people who are so similar, even if in completely different circumstances. This gives me perspective, something that’s hard to maintain when your world consists entirely of conversations with an infant, a coffee table piled with various magazines or books, laundry undone and a pile of yarn.
I went on my first road trip when I was 20, traveling away from college and the state I grew up in to live in a place I’d never seen or really heard much about. Traveling from Colorado east and north until I arrived in Maine, I hardly left the highways. Yet even that kind of uneventful travel was meaningful to me. There’s something about traveling on the ground, seeing the earth move by you as you move towards a destination, that allows you to place yourself, distinguish your new place on the conceptual map we all carry in our minds of the world.
It’s the conceptual that this kind of travel breaks down, and that’s what I love about it. Seeing places and moving yourself through them breaks down the concept that this place is apart from you. Even on my uneventful trip, the east coast was a conceptual “other” place for me. It was something I imagined in my mind and heard people talk about, but saw as “other”, something that was not a part of my life. Like someone who thinks a certain illness or tragedy will never happen to them, and then it does. Finding yourself standing in a place, smelling, hearing, feeling the world around you in that place makes the realness of it, the biology of it, a part of your life, memory and body. It completely breaks down your preconceived notions of it, and you will never think of it the same way. The same thing happens in a place like Europe, Africa, India, Iraq. I don’t think it matters how foreign or different the place is. Inevitably it becomes a real place with real people.
So events, news, wars and stories that you hear about that happen in a place that you’ve stood take on a new meaning. I think we could all stand to see how small the world is, and how alike we all are. But I think we can also stand to see our differences and learn from them. I want to travel more, and more importantly to me I want my son to be able to travel if he wants. Because I want him to have the perspective it can bring. From the little bit of travel I’ve done, and from doing my chair travel that I do now, by watching this program, reading as much as I can, and purposely remembering that there’s a whole world out there, it helps me feel grateful for all that I do have. I think for a person living in American culture there’s no better medicine than seeing how most of the world lives, with little to no material possessions, but often still great joy.
I spend hours now dreaming what feels like opposing dreams. I dream of building roots, no longer just for me but my son. I dream of giving him the feeling that I never had, of really coming from some place. But I also dream of visiting places, seeing new places, smelling the earth on other parts of the globe. Even deeper than that I dream of feeling a deep connection to both here and there, and how my life might be lived with that connection. Maybe a sustainable farm here, and volunteer projects or connections with children there. I don’t know, I don’t even know where “there” is yet. But just the thinking of it is good for me and hopefully good for my son.
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