Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus (A GeoEx eBook)

Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

Ten Silver-Lining Lessons of 2020

6. We Can See the World Without Leaving Our Desk I also found that we can travel afar even when we’re desk- bound. My first experience of this was with the Facebook group “View from my window,” whose members were staying home because of the pandemic, and posting photos to share their everyday views. In one hour of window-scrolling, I beheld a British backyard basking in blue and golden blooms and an Illinois field flowing with freshly fallen snow, a sky- swirling sunrise pasteling Palau and skyscrapers sizzling in dusk-lit Singapore, snow-tipped peaks in Peru and sun- drenched beaches in Brazil, cobbled piazzas in Italy and blue- green bays in Guadeloupe. I saw deer and elk and cockatoos, llamas and lambs and kangaroos. These world-spanning, mind-expanding views brought home a truth I always re-learn when I venture far away: how one person’s exotic is another person’s everyday. 7. We Can Also Welcome the World into Our Home As the months passed, this lesson took on another dimension as well, as my laptop cast a kind of magic spell. With a click of my mouse, I could suddenly Zoom into kitchens and studies and living rooms, to meet with guides, and authors, and students, and friends, in a global conversation that had no end. In this sense, the world became smaller than ever this year; instead of me visiting Earth’s far-flung corners, those corners have visited me, right here in my humble study. Of course, I haven’t been appraising camels in a dusty market, or sipping green tea in a tatami-matted room, or staring at stained-glass glory in an ancient cathedral—but this magic-laptop-ride has still offered world-wandering of a kind. So one more lesson of this stay-at-home year has been how we can communicate across countries and cultures even when we’re not able to travel there.

transported me to the fragrantly framed philosopher’s path in Kyoto. That cherry blossom odyssey inspired this buoyant declaration: “ You can stay at home, feeling stuck and dull, and surrender to despair. But if you look at life in a different way, adventure is everywhere. The time will come when we’ll travel again; we’ll wander near and far. I’ll get to my Japan again; you’ll get to Zanzibar. The time will come, I know it will–this too shall pass, for sure. The global pandemic will end, and spring will bloom once more. And until then, remember this: Earth’s wide wonders still abound, inside and outside too. You hold the key within you now: You just have to open the door. ” Some weeks later, I happened upon a photo of Bali that whisked me to a rice paddy outside Ubud eight autumns before. It was the last day of a one-week stay on that blessed isle, and my one unfulfilled desire was to hear a gamelan orchestra. As I walked in memory through the paddy, I heard the lilting, gonging sounds of a gamelan. I followed those sounds into a nearby forest, but no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find their source. As my sorrow at leaving Bali mingled with my frustration at not seeing the orchestra, an epiphany suddenly struck me: “I didn’t need to see the gamelan to hear its music, and I didn’t need to be in Bali to have Bali in me. It was already there, gonging and trilling and booming, rice paddy blooming, and it always would be.” This notion that we contain the wide world inside us manifested even more marvelously earlier this month, when a box of dusty thirty-year-old notes, maps, and photos that I had excavated from my garage catapulted me back onto the Karakoram Highway in northern Pakistan, on the road to fabled Hunza, my first adventure with GeoEx and an exhausting-but-exhilarating epic that changed my life in many ways. And so I learned this year that we can still widely roam without ever going far from home.

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