*photography by Joe
I’ve lived in the Midwest, on the East Coast, in Asia, and Hawaii. I’ve been to Europe and Bali, South America and Chicago, and a few other cities and continents. Compared to some, this may seem like a lot. Compared to others, I’ve only scratched the surface of the world.
I’ve been to these places, and almost every time I’ve left people behind. I’ve gone to Japan without my family and Guam without my husband and Maui without my son.
And I’ve been left behind. I’ve been left behind by friends and family for Korea, Spain, the Philippines, Singapore. I’ve missed dolphins and mountain ranges, capital cities and entire continents.
To some people, missing things is not a problem. To me it is.
I spent the first 22 years of my life unaware that I loved to travel. I thought I appreciated stability, knowing my surroundings, and running into familiar people at the grocery store. But then I married a Marine, and we moved to Japan, and then we thought we might as well do a little traveling while we were there, and I discovered that the times I felt most alive were when I was doing something so new and different that I had to be fully present to take it all in. And suddenly I couldn’t handle being left behind in ANYTHING.
Not everyone feels this way about travel. But we all have places we wish we were. Sometimes the things we miss are the next state. Sometimes they are the closest city. Sometimes they are a different ocean, a different language.
And in this world, a finite world, where we can only be in one place at one time, we can only handle one life at a time. And in this world, people leave, and someone always gets left behind.
This last weekend, on a much smaller note, I got left behind while Joe did the Maunawili trail by himself. (And who could blame him, after the disastrous attempt last weekend?) So he went alone, both because it was Father’s Day and because I never would have made the 10 miles, on cliffs and over possible rock avalanches with the exhaustion that I’m still recovering from. I know I wouldn’t have made it, but not doing it was still hard.
There are pictures of what I missed.
There are many things that I have missed. Whole cities, continents, oceans, countries.
So I’m here to tell you that if you were born wanting to be somewhere else, go new places, see new things, it doesn’t matter how far you’ve traveled or what you’ve seen. You will always feel left behind because it’s the way our minds work. We always need just a little more money, a little more time, and little more knowledge, a few more cities.
Luckily, in terms of travel, the beauty of this big world is that there will always be places that you haven’t been. Whether it’s 100 or 2 million.
And in that way, we’re all the same.
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