I haven’t always been fond of travel.
As a child, travel usually meant leaving a place I’d come to know, the secret paths through the woods, my favorite climbing tree, and at least one good friend with whom I’d shared dreams and traded secrets. Seeing a new place meant watching the movers wrap my every possession in their crinkly, tan paper and then watching the final procession as they hauled boxes filled with our worldly possessions to their truck. It meant moving away. Living somewhere new. Friends, this is hard stuff for a kid.
But somehow my nomadic tendencies stayed with me, and in the first ten years after I graduated from college I lived in 5 different states. Moving as an adult reinforced what I’d come to believe as a child: our country is filled with vastly different cultures that co-exist, side-by-side, under one grand-old, high-flying flag.
When I lived in the south, people talked about how unfriendly northerners were. When I lived in the north, people talked about how fake southerners were. None of them, mind you, really knew the other. Their assumptions were usually based on hearsay, a story from their parents or a friend, or one unfortunate impression from a vacation gone wrong.
But I did know these people, and these remarks bothered me. “Do you know anyone from the south?” I’d ask, to rolled eyes and quick comebacks about how someone’s cousin went to college there and, ha, that’s all they needed to know. But I’d lived both places. I’d made friends despite the differences. I’d come to embrace those very differences for the richness they added to my life.
My kids don’t have this advantage. They haven’t lived with kids from Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. They’ve been right here, in the same town, in the same state, for most of their lives. But you can bet we talk about it. We talk about how we live in a small community but the world is big. We talk about how our habits aren’t “right,” they’re just what we know. We take them to other places—in our own country and abroad—and say, “Look, see this wide world we live in. These people have never heard of our little town. Respect them. Respect their customs. Life is not simply about us.”
My kids like to travel. To them, it means packing up suitcases, not moving boxes. They don’t know what it’s like to make friends in places where it snows and places where it doesn’t. Their world is small, but I hope their worldview isn’t.
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I wrote this post after reflecting on this week’s Wise Words quote, by Mark Twain:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
Do you agree? Leave your thoughts in a comment and please link back to your post if you write about it, too. You can find more details on participating in Wise Words here.
