Gravity.
A funny thing happened when I married Joe and became a Foreign Service spouse: my world got massively bigger and infinitely smaller at exactly the same time.
Places that had at one point only been lines, stars, and dots on a map started to fill in with textures and colors that hadn’t been there during my required-for-graduation college geography course or in the years that followed. And not just the places I’ve visited but ones that I haven’t been to and may never get to.
As much as GEOG 1982: World Regional Geography had tried to turn me into a global citizen, I don’t think it happened until I started hearing about what life was really like in Accra or Ulaanbaatar. Or, perhaps even more accurately, until I knew somebody or knew somebody who knew somebody who had always or for-a-time called those places home. And, as those somebody’s stories intersected with my own, I began to realize just how interconnected we all are in a way that I suspect was the point of that class so long ago.
I’ve been thinking about that today.
Actually, I’ve been thinking about a big bag of Ukrainian herbal tea and the dear friend who gifted it to me while our stories intersected in Brussels. And of her mom who once visited from Kyiv and who gushed over Nicolas in his stroller when he and I swung by the house to say “hi.” No more than 3 common words between us, my new-ish mama heart really only needed to understand her smile.
I’ve been thinking of another friend. One I wish I had gotten to know even better than I did. Of the day we laughed at just how small the world is, realizing that we had both lived in Minneapolis before stumbling over French vocabulary in a classroom in Auderghem. Of her Ukrainian mama.
And it’s not that I wouldn’t have cared when the headlines hit. It’s that it would have felt more “over there” than it does, even though, as I sit here typing in Santo Domingo, I’m just as far away from that side of the world as I was before I said “yes” to Joe and “yes” to our globally mobile life.
“Over there” is so much closer than it once was.
The world’s expansion and contraction continues for our little family: in a plot twist move, we’re headed to New Delhi this summer. The how and the why are for another day over another cup of chai.
There’s been plenty enough news for one day, no?
