Imagine

It’s been 365 days since I’ve heard my phone ring, opened a letter from a mailbox, owned a key to a door, hugged an old friend, driven a car. A year since I’ve held a job, gotten paid, sat in a favorite chair, seen my family, said hello to a neighbor, or cooked a meal for myself. Today is the one-year birthday of this trip. As the days have collected it’s become more and more difficult for me to reflect and sort through everything that has happened / is happening, how I feel, what to share, and how to talk about it here. It seems either absolutely simple, or overwhelmingly complex, one sentence or an entire novel.

Although sometimes I do it when I’m stuck for how to talk about certain things, for me giving a blow by blow of daily events is nauseatingly boring. I’m not here to make a diary of the minutia of my daily life or give a history lesson. This is something I wanted to avoid in my travel blog, and actually just sort of in life in general. Talking small encourages small thinking. There’s a quote, by an unknown source, that sums this up nicely:

”Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”

We should all aspire to be great minds. Obviously our small interactions are the basis of understanding, and important, but more often than not we just run around in circles with these stories and never move beyond who said what, what happened next, and what we’re having for dinner. I had a million reasons for starting this project and taking this trip, some bigger than others. One big personal reason was that I could no longer stand to run around on this track, just yammering on about nothing. At home I often found if you try to move the conversation into a philosophical realm - instead of talking about the who and the how, start talking about the why and the where to go next - people look at you like you’re ridiculous, saying things like, “You need to stop thinking so much.” What? I will steadfastly protest to that and counter with the belief that in a world with as many problems as we have, we all need to start thinking a lot more.

So, a year has gone by, and most of my idealistic misconceptions about what this trip would mean have been shattered. This is not sad, but sobering. In all honesty, I allowed myself to get swept up in the überpositive clichés we like to attach to traveling the world, like we’re somehow “helping” the people and places we meet by herding through with our tourist dollars in search of Jack Daniel’s buckets and a pizza just like they make at home, while in between maybe we stop in an orphanage to volunteer, where the help we’re offering and paying to give is more often in the service of a corrupt infrastructure than the children or the community. The world is bursting at the seams and technology has us connecting in all sorts of new ways. The Internet makes it incredibly easy to navigate places we’ve never been, move around the globe, and share information. We’re physically capable of connecting but our mentalities are slow to embrace change. We’re still very territorial, insular, and protective of what we think is ours, and the disparities in monetary status breed a lot of resentment and create division.

For example; last night I was having dinner with a couple of friends and we were surrounded by about six or seven kids selling string bracelets and fireworks, each firmly suggesting that we buy something from them for various reasons. They give you a string for “free” so you’re more willing to get your cash out (“Open your heart, open your wallet.” Is a common saying amongst street sellers). They were being funny and engaging, reciting the capitals of countries throughout the world and cracking sarcastic jokes, but they were also being belligerent, trying to drink from beers off our table, light our feet on fire with candles, steal firecrackers that we had bought from one of them, and singling out certain countries that they claimed to dislike, calling the people there “cunts.”

A little girl, named Ocean, who knew all the ways to make a stranger feel a friend, was singing English pop songs, putting her hand on my shoulder, and complimenting my hair and clothes. She tied a friendship bracelet onto my wrist; a “present” then asked that I buy one. I told her I don’t wear bracelets and she persisted, asking for $3. I said I didn’t want one and she asked how much I wanted to pay. I said I didn’t want one and she continued. Finally I said I would give her a dollar and she took it acting very sulky. She told her friends I was American and I had only paid a dollar to which they replied that Americans should pay $10 for that bracelet and why was I so stingy. The collective energy of the little mob started ramping up and they were becoming increasingly aggressive, one pointing his finger in my face, and ending with them shouting threats and saying it was their country, not ours. This is not noteworthy because it’s uncommon, but rather because I’ve consistently encountered this kind of latent animosity in every part of the world I’ve traveled to, even at home in the states. Far from being of benefit to anyone, including ourselves, this kind of hostile exclusivity is what keeps us relating to each other like animals, arguing over scraps of meat and killing each other for claims to territory.

I just finished reading a book that I think everyone should read, called Imagine; How Creativity Works. It talks about the necessity for disparate concepts, customs, and meanings to comingle in order for innovation and the creative genius that’s inherent in all of us to flourish. Now, more than ever, we desperately need to reimagine how we see our lives. We need to stop thinking in terms of my country and start realizing it’s our world. The idea that we’re somehow separated by our income, ethnicity, geography, religion, culture, whatever, is a limiting belief that steals from the potential of what we can build together. We clearly still have a lot of growing pains to endure before we understand how to blend with finesse, and at the end of this year if I had to give a one sentence summary of my feelings on what I’ve seen, it would be; We have a lot of work to do.

In the book I mentioned above, Jonha Lehrer defines creativity as the ability to imagine that which has never existed before. I think that’s what we need to do, all of us; turn our brains on, and think too much, have more fun, go more places, see and do all kinds of things, open our arms to differences, cultivate great minds, and share with everyone we can. It’s easy to feel frustrated and small in the face of this big bad world, but far from feeling defeated I still believe in our limitless potential. We have the power to make our lives incredible.

As I was writing this John Lennon came on in the café and sang these words, perfect timing…

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people living life in peace

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people sharing all the world

You may say that

I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one

I hope some day you’ll join us

And the world will be as one