Dembling: “Our Small World Gets Bigger With Every Trip”
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.14.06 | 7:25 PM ET
Travel isn’t a part-time endeavor and it doesn’t end when you close your front door behind you when you get home. It’s something that seeps into every part of your life. Sophia Dembling knows this, and she’s written a terrific column articulating why in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. “I was driving home from the hairdresser the other day, thinking about this and that and what to make for dinner when NPR started talking about rural China. I turned up the radio, forgot about dinner and listened with interest. Why? Because I’ve been to China,” she writes. “It’s been a couple of years since my tour of China, and I wasn’t anywhere near the towns under discussion on the radio. But, as always happens for me, after I’ve visited a place, it is forever more interesting to me.”
She continues:
While you needn’t be Commander McBragg about your travels, I think having traveled informs everything you think or do, if only in that it forces you to confront the minuscule place you hold in an enormous world. It requires that you accept without debate that your way is only one way in millions. It gives you points of reference all over the globe.
And, done right, travel begins to unravel some of the mysteries of modern times so that we are perpetually conscious of the wide world even as we mill about the small world we inhabit daily. Which means that our small world gets bigger with every trip.
Dembling’s syndicated “Wandering Mind” column runs in the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News and other papers.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
