Tuesday, April 04, 2006

on the little things and the bigger picture...

This post is in response to Bennet’s post about travel and appreciating and understanding where we are and all that. Don’t know if it may be at all enlightening, it’s just some musings of my own…
Bennet, I just want to start off this new entry by saying that I absolutely feel you about the transient nature of this whole experience. The fact is that as we move freely from one continent to another, one country to another, and indeed one community to another, we enter momentarily into lives and histories that we can only glimpse in the few Mondays or Sundays that we choose to spend there. Over and over I have been struck by the fact that lives continue as they did the days when I was there now that I am gone, that my family in Nicaragua is waking up early and making tortillas, that waves are still crashing, and the women on the street are still selling banana bread in San Pedro. I was there to become a part of their lives a few short days, and I garnered some understanding of what it means to wake up there, spend the day picking coffee or playing dominoes. But there is so much to know, to learn, to love, about each place.
Much of this has made me appreciate my home and where I come from, and the sheer number of things that there are to learn about it, but even more than that, I have been impressed, motivated, thrilled by the number of things there are to learn in each place I have visited. I alternate between feeling that I want to run around to learn and experience as much as possible and recognizing that many of the things that are most significant and most meaningful in a new place may be quieter; things like enjoying a cup of coffee or a cooking lesson. Over and over again, I am overwhelmed at all of the things that I want to do in each of these places, the connections I want to make, the cultures I want to understand, the lives I want to experience. In each, I come away feeling that the understanding I have amassed is meaningful but so tiny; as you say, there are lifetimes going on instantaneously all around us; each one, each moment, is worthy of a study in itself. We are glimpsing whole existences, in which people live and die, laugh, have children, love, work, buy groceries, and enjoy each other. I feel blessed when I get to participate in all of those actions, for a moment, their lives and my life cross and we share something that increases our understanding of each other.
A book I recently read made this statement about life: “To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.” This year, even as we get only hints at the lives and places that we visit, we become marked by them, they become part of our stories. I think that while in some ways the brevity of those moments or the smallness of the picture that we gather may feel irresponsible since there is so much more to know, these are the moments that make up our stories, and so cannot be irresponsible. Nor can the insights and experiences that we have be small or trivial; each allows us a better understanding of our own places. They broaden our stories even as we dig deeply into one focus. And in those moments, we learn something about the cracks in our own sidewalks in places where there are no sidewalks, about our flowers by smelling new flowers, by the molecules around and inside us that are the same everywhere that we go.
So as we step off one airplane or bus or street into another in a new country or a new continent, I think all we can do is take a deep breath and try to notice everything. The sights and smells and smiles. There will be plenty of time to think more about it when we get home. For the time being, all we can do is take in as much as possible.

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