Mapping the Gap

I’m running again… in case you were wondering.  My knee is about 90%.  I still hobble with stiffness when I sit for too long, but I’m back in the natural world, jogging down lanes and along the beaches here in Hoi An.  There are occasional grumbles of rebellion that limit my distance, but no sign of mutiny on the high knees. (Good one, hey?)

In this comeback, I have realised something, but maybe it was something I already knew but forgot.  Running, for me, isn’t just about maintaining a good baseline strength or the happy chemicals released in the brain.  It is that, but it’s also a lot more.  My running is a practice of presence and reflection, a time when I say thank you to Life.  Maybe I’m weird, but I talk to the trees and the light that falls through their branches as I jog through the world.  I literally whisper things to the sun, the clouds, and the sea.  I say out-loud hellos to flowers, shells, leaves, bugs, and birds.  When I type that out, it makes me sound like a Snow White in spandex or something, but it’s true. 

Without kids or work or piles of tasks that need doing, I use my runs as a time to break up the tension and welcome in the light of being alive.  I didn’t realise the importance of this practice until I had such a long stent of being unable to run.  In the midst of the messy wilds of this wonderful life I’ve conjured, I know I should profess great gratitude. And I do this when I run. Sometimes I just breathe out thank-yous and name my wealth of blessings into the wind.  It feels as if I am heard and even engaged with as the surf reaches for my passing feet or the leaves wave in agreement.  There is a deep debt of thank-yous I owe in this world. Running is when I really let myself feel that. I had forgotten that was part of the running magic.  It’s so good to be back.

I can see now that this running vocalisation is also quite important to my progression as a person.  It’s not just appreciation and acknowledgement that I voice. I speak aloud on a lot of things that aren’t for a human audience: my exhaustion with the scramble, my wishes for my children, my pleas for assistance and strength, my anger, my creative buddings, questions, lots of whys, and even my biggest, boldest, stark-raving-maddest dreams- like taking a gap year around the world with my family. 

In fact, before my partner and I had even conceptualised this endeavour beyond vague wishes over wine glasses, it was the sea of Seven Mile Beach who heard the notion of this trip uttered aloud for the first time.  The ocean is a good confidant.  Feels like she can absorb a lot.  One day, aching with the struggles of my children and not really understanding what I wished for, I said something like, “Please help me take my boys around the world.”  I remember this moment.  I hadn’t thought the thought.  The words had conjured themselves.  And when I said it, I was aware that a genius spark had been struck.  With gusto, I broadcast the plea again, sending the wish consciously into the far-reaching sea.  Without any notion of the manner by which I could achieve such a thing, I called out a dream into the ether.  (It’s okay to do this.  We’ve just been told it’s silly.)  Then, I jogged on and got in my car and drove off into my life, diving headfirst into the endeavour of getting as much done as possible before school pick-up, disappearing wholly into the crush of another race around the sun.  I drove off and left my dream suspended in the misty breeze above the Pacific, forgetting all about it.  I realise it might sound odd to ask for such a thing- a journey around the world.  But it’s not so peculiar once you’ve heard the origin story.  You see, the sea and I have a history.

As a university student, I did my semester abroad in a unique way. I couldn’t decide what country I wanted to study in for a semester, so I decided to order the whole menu, and, with all my privileged flags flying, my parents signed me up for a program called Semester at Sea.  This was a cruise ship turned seafaring university, which carried about 300 mostly American college students around the world in 90 days.  The main lounge and dance floor of the ship were converted into a student union, and the circulation desk of the library was formerly a bar.  I took 12 credit units for the semester, classes like Literature of the Sea, World Religions, and the like.  Our professors brought their families aboard for the voyage, and we circumnavigated the globe together, taking classes between our ten ports-of-call.  During our four-to-five-day stops in these exotic lands, we would do “excursions” as part of our learning.  I was “world-schooling.” Don’t laugh, but I just realised this now.   

In Fall 2000, the SS Universe Explorer was my home, and we were set to cruise from Vancouver, Canada through five Asian ports, then through the Suez Canal to Europe, and then across the Atlantic to Cuba before arriving in the US.  Sounds like an epic party cruise?  It sort of was, but the hangover back home for me was profound.  I washed up on the shores of New Orleans three months later a broken little soul.  Reverse Culture Shock is the worst. 

This was my first brush with the true disparity of the world.  Actually, it wasn’t a brush.  It was a full body slam, sumo-style.  As a privileged white American girl, the oppression, poverty, and suffering that blasted us were more than I could absorb.  Crying babies lying in the dirt, the stench of festering wounds, intentionally maimed beggars, children painted for prostitution, embargos, political oppression, gag-triggering trash heaps, families with toddlers living feet from busy streets, orphans with fingers motioning to their mouths, the hollow expressions of ladies of the night, advanced cancer, choking pollution, crime, violence, misery, and resentment.  They followed me home.  They seeped into my skin and into my dreams, and back at my university house in Des Moines, Iowa, the sights and smells of these people haunted me.  The pinch of a hungry little girl was a phantom on my forearm.  Unable to simply get back to class, I dropped out of my university of privilege and faced a reckoning. 

Who was I to have this lavish life of higher education and garbage disposals for excess food?  Who was I to have the right to decide who handled my body and which profession I wanted to assume?  Who was I to have birth control, hot running water, and 27 choices of toothpaste?  It all disgusted me.  I disgusted me.  I didn’t deserve any of it, but I couldn’t give it away.  I would have given anything to release myself of this guilt, to escape my self-loathing and my distain for my gluttonous, self-blinded culture.  All I wanted was to trade places with the suffering souls and be washed clean of the stains of my unearned blessings.  I agonised for months over every plate of food, hating myself for ever denying myself sustenance for the sake of a slim figure.  Yet, I found myself too full of guilt to eat.  I wanted to give it all away and live as so many are forced to.  But I could not.  These were dark days.

But, at the age of 21, a life-altering deal was struck.  After a long, icy winter in Des Moines, I decided I would live as one of those suffering souls would live if they could switch places with me.  I would live awake and grateful for my opportunities, comforts, and liberties.  I would live a life that honours those who are born without.  I would do what I could to improve the paths of others through the application of my abilities and opportunities.  I would take full advantage of all I’d been given.  I would live a good life because I could. And because so many others could not.  Or, at least, I would try.  And I have.

Pan to a beach in Australia.  A mother pounding the sand and lamenting the unnecessary suffering of her children- the agonising dissatisfactions and pathologies of a life in paradise. I think I asked the sea to take my family around the world that day because it was this semester that awoke my appetite to live a fully actualised and grateful life.  I want my kids to get this too.  I want to save them from all the suffering of the fortunate life, the limited understanding of how lucky they are. Most parents feel this, the cringe over an oblivious and spoiled child.  I don’t want them to feel guilty or ungrateful.  I want them to feel wise.  I want to gift them with perspective, the kind that minimises challenges, softens pain, ignites compassion, and expands one’s sense of the possible.  I want them to feel rich and capable and animated with passion for life.  I want their privilege to empower them.  Is that too lofty of a goal for this gap year?  Maybe so.  Is that too much to expect of these little developing humans?  Probably.   But I think we all gather different lessons from the same experiences, and I have full faith that while they may not learn exactly what I did, they’ll learn what they need to.  And the lessons will likely be close cousins. 

Funnily, it was many months later that I even remembered that run on Seven Mile Beach.  When my partner and I were working and reworking the list of countries for our newly-conceptualised “gap year” itinerary, it occurred to me: I’m taking my boys around the world! I actually asked for this impossible reality.  Out loud.  Clear as day.  And here it is.  Without tracking any details of its becoming, my spoken dream had manifested.  Our words have immense power.  Anyone who says they don’t probably isn’t living a dream.

And there is another unintentional, serendipitous wrinkle to this 25-year origin story.  Our Semester at Sea voyage, Fall 2000, had to be rerouted.  On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole, a U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, was bombed by terrorists in the port of Aden in Yemen just weeks before our ship was to pass through the Suez Canal.  Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda took responsibility. It was the first time in my life I had been so directly impacted by international events, and I was more than a bit grumpy about it.  9/11 was less than a year away.  American immunity to the impact of global resentment was about to expire.  This was a little taster for us.

So, what did this bombing mean for a ship of college students?  A big, fat detour around the Cape of Good Hope.  This must be one of the largest detours one can take on the planet.  How fortunate were we to just cruise on our merry way and evade the world’s unpleasantries.  Our redirected voyage took us to Kenya, South Africa, and Brazil.  Of course, it was tremendous, and I’m glad it worked out the way it did, but I was sad to miss the other countries: Egypt, Turkey, Croatia, and Spain.  I did make it to Spain in 2007, and it was there that I met my husband, but the other ports have evaded all my travels. 

Once again though, I find myself staring at our gap year itinerary in total intoxicated awe.  Without any thought of Semester at Sea, we are booked to visit all three of the remaining missed ports. This itinerary was rearranged with dozens of additions and omissions over months and months of research by my partner and me.  Half the time, when we picked up the planning conversation, we couldn’t remember which countries we’d decided on the last time we spoke.  The loosey-goosey factors that brought us to these destinations were related to costs, visas, educational opportunities, the odd blog post lead, kid-friendly sites, ease of bookings between cities, friend recommendations, and the randomness that guides you when you have the whole world to choose from.  There was certainly no conscious orchestration by the ghost of my 21-year-old self.  But, here I am, 25 years later, staring at an itinerary that completes the original voyage of Fall 2000: Egypt, Turkey, Croatia and Spain… and I’m doing it with a darling partner and three wild warrior children that my university self would have been quite pleased to know were waiting for me up the path.

Damn, I love the way the Universe dips and spins you when you trustingly fling yourself into its arms.  This gap year is the full activation of what I learned while “at sea.”  This is the settling of the debt I couldn’t pay.  This is the source of my Boldness.  And these synchronicities are Life’s glorious nod of approval. This is why I run the way I run.  There aren’t enough thank-yous to cover all the abundance in this world.  It’s best to set them free with regularity.

Disclaimer:  I should say, my partner might have a different origin story.  Maybe he will chime in someday.  In the meantime, I’ll go ahead and monopolise the family storyline.  

Thanks, all, for your interest in our journey.  I’ll leave the travel update to the imagery… Spot the “bird” and the fresh tat…