I Envy Her Freedom

(May 7, 2019)

I’ve always wanted to travel. To fly with the wind and blow with the sand. To wear boots that crunch and have tough hands that climb. To have dirt on my pants and clothes that withstand. 

I watch her life. She is not tied down. Her hair is always a little tangled, and her face looks wrinkled and freckled by the sun. Her naked eyes dance because of the things she’s seen. 

I want to be her, and yet, I don’t. She’s always traveling. In fact, I don’t know if she’s ever stopped, settled, been faithful. They say she’s flighty. She’s unreliable. She wants to be where things are happening, not where things have happened. She has no roots. She’s never stayed anywhere long enough to let them grow. I’ve always kind of envied her in a sense. No obligations, no expectations, no one waiting up for you, no need to “follow through.”... freedom.

Is that freedom? Freedom from what? People?

She has people around her, but only when she wants—she finds them when they will get her from point A to point B. They have become her trains, her cars, her roads. 

She has seen many things. I have longed to have her eyes, her ears, her nose. I wish to have seen those same scenes, heard those same sounds, sniffed those same scents. She has hungry eyes that are never quite satisfied.

But maybe it’s not so much about the quantity of what you see but the quality? I am not entirely convinced, but maybe I’m onto something. To see every type of terrain and culture must be something quite breathtaking and informing... but at the same time, to have the eye quickly pass over something must also mean that you missed the hidden nuances of both beauty and ugliness found within those things.

One might be informed from their experience, but to be changed and enlightened is entirely different—this requires immersion. This requires roots to grow. This requires quality of experience; it requires time, obligation, dependency, reliability. To learn and be learned from, requires commitment and hardship. You have to sit amongst a culture to understand it; you have to participate in a community to grow from it. Observing from afar can give us an impression too easily manipulated by our own lens of interpretation. The same goes for a place. A person who walks every street will know the crevices of a city and the stones that make it strong. The one who flies over that same city will know it, but only to a certain degree—by the tops of its buildings.

So I guess establishing roots and settling in one place for a while, doesn’t mean you see less, it just means you see different. You may not see the layer of dirt that covers the mountains in the west to the valleys in the east, but instead, you see every grain of sand that reaches down far below the surface. You know each rock and pebble that tightly pushes and faithfully holds your roots. And you see and feel the water under the surface that fills those roots, making them satisfied and thriving. And these are the things that are missed when she doesn’t stay long enough to let herself settle in and grow with her surroundings. And these “pebbles” and “rocks” and “water,” are people and obligations and hardship.

But I guess a person is always giving up something at the cost of another. Quality versus quantity, and to each their own.