Oh the woes of the Cincinnati sports fan. Years, and years, and more years, then decades, with nothing but drought. A flower would bloom once in a blue moon, only to be clipped at the root as soon as it heard the word "playoffs."
But this year, of all years, beyond all expectations, the Bengals emerge from the jungle to take their rightful throne—of the AFC for now, of the entire NFL by tomorrow night.
Meanwhile, I'm in the real jungle, like actually in the Amazon rainforest. Which typically wouldn't be something to complain about. But now? Lord, why did it have to be this year?
I suppose I can't be too surprised. It's not like it's the only time I've spent an extended period out of the country. I was living in Berlin as an exchange student in 2005 when the Bengals made their first playoff appearance since I started watching football. Internet not being then what it is now, I had no way to watch the game, other than wait for cartoon helmets to move every 60 seconds on ESPN game cast. And I was in an apartment in South Korea when the Reds made their own first post-season appearance in 15 years. Meanwhile, in this present moment, a big group of my best friends from high school are in L.A. and are actually going to the Superbowl tomorrow. Wow.
Yes, as much as I love living abroad, missing out on things back home is just part of the game. I've heard it called the "curse of the traveler."
It's not just sports that I've missed. It's family reunions, holiday and birthday celebrations, funerals—those are just a few of the occasions I wished I could have been home for. But more importantly than the events I've missed out on are the relationships. I'm blessed to have dozens of people that I've kept in touch with even throughout my sojourns in other lands, but I'm sure we're not as close as we would have been had I stuck around Cincinnati my whole life. The memories of shared experiences and good times will always be there, but there's something about the lack of physical proximity that creates distance in a relationship as well. I think the sheer amount of hours you spend sharing space with another body determines how close you'll end up feeling to them. Which is why people are usually closer to their family, or whomever they lived with when they were younger, than anyone.
Maybe the most devastating part of the curse is that when you return, you find that people's perspectives on life haven't shifted in the same ways yours have. As logical as it is, there's always something jarring about coming home and finding that you can't quite relate to your best friends as much. The memories of past times and the feelings of comfort are there; it's the worldview and philosophy that are often different.
I have a lot of friends from childhood who I still keep in touch with, but have unfortunately grown apart from. I started noticing around our mid-twenties—right after several years living overseas—that our priorities and interests simply didn't match up anymore. It's sad, and the older I get, the more it weighs on me.
I've been thinking about this a lot, as we recently spent a whole month in Iquitos, so deep in the jungle that you can only take a boat or fly in; there are no roads connecting it with the rest of Peru. The vast majority of people we saw on a day to day basis will never leave the country. In fact, a friend we made there had never left the state of Loreto in his sixty-three years of life, and I don't think that's uncommon. This has everything to do with privilege and inequality—he even said that it was a money issue that kept him from visiting other places—and I will always advocate and fight for a world where that is no longer the case.
On the one hand, those who haven't had the privilege to "broaden their scope" through travel, as Malcolm X called it, sometimes hold opinions that come off as provincial or narrow-minded. But on the other hand, I've started to realize that people who spend their whole lives in one place, whether by choice or by circumstance, have something that I don't.
They have community, relationships, bonds forged from spending every single day, week in and week out, year after year, with basically the same people around them. They know how to LIVE together, to resolve conflict, to find ways to love their neighbor, whomever it is, because they can't just move away. I was amazed at how unprotective people in Iquitos were of their property, especially compared to North Americans. Doors to houses were left wide open, even when they butted right up against the sidewalk of a busy street, and neighbors from all around would come and go regularly. On a tour down the Amazon river, our guide would just walk into folks' houses unannounced, and they didn't seem the least bit perturbed.
Someone once told me that people often travel because they have unresolved trauma or pain that they haven't yet faced back home. I know that was true for me in the past, and perhaps it still is to some degree now. I wouldn't trade my experiences abroad for the world, because they have opened me to so many different ways of understanding, interacting with, and simply being in the world. They have made me who I am.
Yet I sometimes wonder what my life would look like if I hadn't had both the privilege and adventurousness that propelled me to leave so often. Certainly, it would be different. I'd be a lot less knowledgeable about a lot of things. But I think I would have something within me that I wish I had more of: the resilience to go with the flow and take life as it comes. Additionally, I would be closer with some of the people I've grown apart from, and what's more important than that?
The curse of the traveler primarily only affects the privileged, which in the world we live in, means mostly white folks. And yet in light of what I've been reflecting on, this turns into another of the many paradoxes of white supremacy: that by taking advantage of the privilege to travel, we risk neglecting something that is even more important, which is our relationships with the people closest to us. Surely, there is a balance somewhere. Everyone should be entitled to do some traveling, to live out the adventure that humans seem to yearn for from deep within in our unconscious—just not so much that we sacrifice our connection to community, and not so much that it prohibits others from doing so. I point this out because it relates back to something I've long been convinced of: that an unequal world creates imbalance and suffering not only in the lives of the oppressed but also, in a much different way, for those who benefit from that oppression. What that means for me personally is something I will probably be trying to figure out throughout my whole life, but in the meantime, hopefully this post provides some food for thought for both the traveling and the sedentary readers out there.
Last but certainly not least,
WHO DEY
I'm confident we'll be Super Bowl champs by this time tomorrow.
Really nice reflections here about the privileges and pitfalls of travel. Even though I love it myself, I've come to understand that for many it's simply not enjoyable and/or insight producing. That's just part of the diversity of the human landscape, as is economic inequality, which also has many benefits and pitfalls. Sometime I'd like to have a long talk about inequality and how to optimize to reduce suffering. I remain convinced that most thoughtful people worry far too much about the privilege we enjoy and far too little about how to bring the benefits of free markets to all. Traveling more has powerfully reinforced that notion for me, though it seems to have had the opposite effect on you?
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