Ramblings on Returning

The day has finally come, the one in which for the first time since January I put away my passport and instead of packing suitcases and buying imodium, I make a list for school supplies. Instead of double and triple checking beacoups of plane tickets (in order to avoid spending the night in the Istanbul airport because you thought your flight was leaving at 8:30pm rather than 8:30am, ahem, possibly a true story), I am planning my google calendar and scanning Pinterest for creative “dorm-friendly” recipes. Sometimes my life just doesn’t make sense.

It is a bitter sweet feeling leaving this season of travel behind, it truly has been an adventure of epic proportions. Beginning in frigid New York city just after Christmas I met a big group of strangers that would become some of the people who have most impacted by life, and we spent our spring semester in Nepal, Jordan, and Chile studying human rights. We met inspiring artists and activists at the grassroots, hung out in the CIA of Jordan, spent afternoons in refugee camps, and discovered unprecedented appreciation for an indigenous community in the mountains of Southern Chile. From there I headed to Geneva, Switzerland to study multilateral diplomacy and conduct research on intersections of sexual and gender based violence against women and girls with disabilities in the context of forced displacement–yes, you may or may not pass out trying to read the title of my paper in one breath. Afterward, I left the halls of the United Nations Headquarters and conferences with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to sit in the dirt at a run-down school in western Kenya, and rather than analyzing policies on persons with disabilities and refugees, I spent time talking to them, or more accurately, listening to them. And in doing so learned ten times more than I did in any conference (surprise, surprise). Now I’m sitting in Pagosa Springs, Colorado trying to figure out how to prepare myself to move back to North Carolina and settle into a “normal” life routine–whatever that is.

Truth is, there are little selfish things I am excited for, like unpacking my clothes into a closet and knowing they will be there for more than 4 weeks. I’m excited to cook in a kitchen, food of my choosing that is comfortable and familiar, and possibly significantly less loaded with carbs. I’m excited to work out in a gym and go to dance performances on the weekend, or sit in a coffee shop and ponder life with my friends. I’m excited for the flaming fall colors that will light up the North Carolina forests and spontaneous road trips up the coast that will help in keeping the travel bug at bay.

But apart from the little things that make life comfortable and stable, I’m sad to see this season end. Constant travel is like living on a constant high. It is a continual process of stimulation, challenge, and growth. At times it manifests in a cycle of highs and lows, but for me the lows were quite shallow and the highs only built on one another. It is as if traveling makes all your senses come alive, there is no room for dullness or normality when all you are experiencing is constantly new and exciting. The tastes are different, the smells are different, the architecture is a continually shifting narrative on culture, wealth, and the lived experience of people who inhabit that building or pray in that temple. You learn to have a sharpened radar for picking up on cultural nuances and also learn to examine those nuances and find within them something about the people who create them. You are forced to embrace norms and mannerisms that at first seem unfamiliar, but by the end of it you are perfectly comfortable with the never-ending kisses the Swiss exchange upon greeting, or the way Kenyans squeeze your hand 8 different ways before pressing their cheek to yours. You learn to bargain with different strategies and in different languages, and feel a sense of pride when you refrain from being totally ripped off.

I’ve learned to look for those unexpected moments of human interaction, whether it be spending 4 hours in conversation with an aerospace engineer in an airport or sitting next to a world famous western artist on a plane into Colorado, on the back of a motorcycle in Kisumu, or in a taxi as the rain pours down over Amman. These are some of my favorite moments, the ones where you find yourself face-to-face with a complete stranger, but some how leave feeling like you’ve known them a lifetime. It is beautiful because it is fleeting. You know it doesn’t last, and you know that when you part ways you very well may never encounter that person again, which forces you to savor it, inscribing those special moments and conversations in the sacred part of your heart reserved for things that are fleeting.

I think travel makes the world seem bigger while simultaneously making it smaller. It is a paradox that only a nomad will understand, that sense that in each place you journey you’ve only scratched the surface, and yet the world becomes more of a home, defined and connected by the network you’ve forged around it. Borders become fuzzy, and in their place is a web of faces and experiences that connect you with someone else, or one memory to another. They often clash out of the blue, one feeling, face, or memory meeting another at completely different coordinates.

Like sitting in Geneva at the conference table at UNHCR reading reports on refugees in Nepal and Dadaab, the faces of Tibetan students or my friends at Joyland flickering through my mind, or catching a diplomat speaking Swahili on the train to the UN and exchanging a friendly “habari gani?” like old friends. Like watching from your sofa in Kenya as bombs burst and Gazans try to flee, images of a Palestinian community center you visited outside of Amman bringing tears to your cheeks, because somewhere in between meeting those university volunteers and sitting in the living room of that Palestinian mother’s home, their struggle found it’s way into yours. Or even in simpler things like picking up the romantic accent of a Chilean sitting in front of you on a plane out of Turkey, the sound surfacing tender memories of brunch on the back porch as your host dad plays lovely Spanish melodies on a six string guitar, or having a long chat with an Indian woman, born in Nepal, at the Sunday afternoon open air market in Switzerland.

If you travel enough and meet enough people, the world doesn’t nessecarily become smaller, it simply becomes more intertwined. And the more intertwined it becomes, the more you realize that regardless of where you find yourself on this vast and diverse planet, we are all human. Whether or not we wear similar clothes or pray to the same god, we are all human. We have hopes and fears, and an innate need to create, express, and dream. We shed tears and laugh until our abs burn. We crave sincere exchanges, the strength of those who support us, or a tender touch. We all want to be loved, we all want to live in dignity. It is a simple revelation, but one that changes everything when it becomes a lived reality.

And that is the point, isn’t it? That as you set out on a journey to find yourself, you find the world instead. You a part of it, and it a part of you, a mysterious exchange that results in a sense of wholeness and belonging even as pieces of you are spread across the nations. And in that belonging we find solidarity. We find hope. We find our own faces in the faces of “the other” and in doing so we learn to love despite our habit of drifting towards selfishness, and erecting barriers of difference.

It is a gift to experience this process. Even as I depart a new place where my heart has found a home and I feel those waves of loss, I still feel the privilege of having the experience at all. I feel as though if more of us were to search the world for people we could love despite the division we cultivate, our global landscape would look utterly different. So I encourage you to pick up your passport, pack your bag, and see for yourself if you can find such solidarity. My world tour may be over for now, but its impact on my life is only just beginning.