“...to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the lines of thought dip deep into the stream.”
I was curiously entrenched in passages about the study of empathy in elephant social groups when suddenly, shifting strands of sunlight caught the corner of my eye. Glancing up, I trace the rays through an eastward window pane back to treetops swaying playfully in midsummer’s morning breeze and strumming the cascades of sun in a game of light and shadows.
I wonder: What do treetops look like in Queensland? How does sunlight appear to refract in Tanzania? Does the same moment of sheer delight exist halfway across the globe or decades into the previous millennium?
I squint my eyes a bit and look up past the trees into an eastern sky that grows increasingly more golden in the early morning.
I have never been one to travel extensively either in the fashion of great travel writers or Instagram influencers. Yet I have never felt that I was missing out on the world by not travelling to every coveted corner. When I see beautiful places captured in photographs and videos, I feel the relatable urge to apparate into billowing fields and frozen waterfalls and breath in every descriptive essence of the moment. When I encounter poignant passages of writing, all the same, I roll the words in my mouth until the smell of salty seawater and verdant rainforests materialize.
I have seen the white hot desert sands from atop the Burj Khalifa, and I have sailed the Strait of Magellan aboard the HMS Beagle. I have sat on dirt floors watching rangoli competitions in orphan homes, and I have sojourned in the joys and struggles of this land through pages of Naipaul. I have the utmost appreciation for the perspective and local eye that a work like A Year in Provence surfaces in the way that scattered travels of my own constrained by time, culture, and language, perhaps never would do.
If I saved the intake mindset of experiencing the spacetime continuum solely for travel, how limited and narrow would my worldview be? I have loved every sunrise before my eyes, and every one in the globe of my imagination across lands and skies never measured before.