Big Wanderings and Small Wanderings
It’s been two months since I landed in Istanbul on a last-minute flight from DC, to meet Zeynep who had just arrived on a last-minute flight from Berlin. We both felt a little weird about essentially panic-booking flights outta Dodge to Istanbul… and two months later that’s sort of a funny feeling. We have, throughout this experience, been a little worried about overreacting, when in hindsight we have consistently underestimated how significant Pandemic I (to borrow a Gatesian phrase) would change everything.
Suffice it to say our “year off” has been shortened a fair bit. No Africa, no Iceland, no North Ridge of Mount Baker or circum-hiking Lichtenstein, no sailing in the BVIs and no beach trip with friends to Croatia. When typed out, it feels both like that was a surplus of riches that perhaps nobody has a right to want, and like a set of life experiences I’m really and truly upset to have lost…for now.
Like everybody else I guess, we’ve gone through various phases of COVID acceptance. There’s the crafty phase, which for me was two book vaults and that was it, but for Zeynep (see above) has been an opportunity to scratch an artist’s itch she’s long had. It’s a funny thing to have known somebody so long and so well, and still from time to time be surprised by hidden talents.
There was also the bread baking phase, which mostly consisted of lots of banana bread, so much banana bread that at some point I stopped making it because we’d never actually eat it all. Zeynep has been more adventurous and successful in her culinary endeavours, including a foray into a Turkish liver dish that I find stinky and scary but everybody else in the house absolutely loved.
Being stuck inside - and specifically stuck inside with a view of the Bosphorous - has been an accidental joy for the ship-watcher in me. We’ve seen all sorts of ships: big ships, small ships, old ships, new ships, weird ships. Among the weird ships have been a Russian sail-training schooner, a brand new (oops) carbon-neutral ice-breaking cruise ship, and an exploration drilling rig being towed by Bosphorus tug boats. Not to mention the local crowd favorite, the Istanbul Metropolitan Trash Boats!
We’ve also indulged, with some frequency, the COVID acceptance phase of All-The-Days-Are-Blending-Together-Oh-God. I think Zeynep and I have felt this fairly acutely because of the whiplash from our travels straight into lockdown. We’re firm believers that new experiences (new places help but are not required) change how you perceive time, that great adventures make the days go by fast but make the larger chunk of time, upon reflection, feel big and full. This experience, while new for sure and an adventure of sorts, seems to have the opposite effect, slowing down the individual days to a relative crawl while making the two months that have passed feel like a blur that’s difficult to recall in any detail.
Zeynep has this idea of Big Infinities and Small Infinities. A great illustration is the difference between flying somewhere and hiking somewhere. By flying from place to place, you get this amazing view (literal and figurative) of big swaths of life, and can cover lots of places and experiences in a period of time. By walking, you can’t cover nearly as much ground in the same time, but will experience and remember the gnarled olive tree or the icy stream. Both are good and important and have different glories to recommend them.
During the last months of adventure we’ve tried to invest in both, in that we covered lots of ground, had lots of experiences in lots of places, but chose adventures by and large that got us down into the small infinities of the place. The abrupt end to this year off is a bummer for lots of reasons, but perhaps chief among them is the lost small infinities.
The silver lining, however, is that from here we’re flying to DC (on the outbound leg of a Turkish Airlines flight being used to repatriate Turks stuck in Houston), where a large and lovely world of small infinities await. When we set off on this year we had no idea, genuinely, where we’d land at the end, but I’m confident if you’d asked us DC wouldn’t have been at the top of our lists. But after a lot of wandering, we’re feeling excited about poking around the small infinities of a place that we know well in some ways but have yet to discover in others. That we have friends and family there is extra-exciting in this moment, when a sense of community feels more important than ever. (Of course, we find ourselves with a small pile of vouchers on Iceland Air and Kenya Airways, and those things won’t use themselves, so stay tuned for more big-infinities-wanderings as soon as safe to do so.)
For now, I leave you with a picture of Zeynep and Crow in a kennel, because sometimes love is being stuck in a small space with somebody who’s feeling a little anxious and just needs a hug and a treat.
