This is a continuation of an earlier thought, first explored in Does That Go Both Ways?.
That article began with a simple sentence: “It’s close.”
I kept thinking about why those words stayed with me. And I think I know why.
I was visiting the country I came from. I was born there and had lived there. Even though I came from another part of the country, the place was closer to where I had lived than to where most of the other people around the pool had come from, or where I live now.
And yet, it had never really felt close to me.
When I lived there, places like this belonged to a different kind of life, one familiar mostly to people from another part of the world. I knew they existed, of course. I could see them, walk past them, perhaps imagine what it would be like to stay in one.
But knowing a place exists and being able to experience it are two different things.
Now I live in another country, much farther away.
And somehow, I can come here.
I can sit by the pool of a hotel, spend an afternoon doing nothing, and enjoy a place that once felt as though it belonged to another world.
The strange thing is that the place hasn’t changed. Neither has the distance between it and the part of the country where I grew up.
Somehow, I had to leave before I could return and experience this place in a way I never could when I lived there.
There is something almost funny about that.
The farther away I went, the closer this place became.
I wonder if this happens more often than we realize.
We tend to think of distance as something simple. A place is either near or far. We look at a map, see the space between two points, and think we understand the relationship between them.
But perhaps a place can be near in one sense and impossibly far in another.
And perhaps the reverse is true, too.
A place on the other side of the world might be easier to reach than somewhere just around the corner.
It depends, I suppose, on where you happen to be standing.
Not just geographically, but in life.
Sitting there by the pool, I wondered whether the people around me had ever thought about this.
For most of the guests, this hotel was probably just somewhere they had chosen to spend a few days. A pleasant place to rest, enjoy the water, and escape their usual routines.
There is nothing unusual about that. After all, that was exactly what I was doing, too.
But I wondered how many of them had ever experienced the other side of such a place. What it was like to live nearby and never imagine themselves staying there. To see a place as part of the scenery rather than as somewhere they might one day visit.
Perhaps some of them had. I couldn’t know.
And I wondered the same thing in reverse.
Could someone who had always known this kind of comfort really understand what it was like to live without it?
Not simply know that other people live differently. Most of us know that.
But understand it in the way we understand something we have experienced ourselves.
I don’t know.
Perhaps experience makes certain things easier to understand. Perhaps it only gives us another perspective, another way of looking at the same world.
I have experienced both sides, at least in some sense. I know what it is like to live in a place without imagining that I could experience it this way. And I know what it is like to return from somewhere farther away and find that the place is now within reach.
But even having experienced both doesn’t mean I understand everything about either side.
There are still lives I cannot imagine. There are circumstances I have never known, and things that seem ordinary to other people that I might never fully understand.
Even people who have experienced the same things I have might see them differently. They might come away with different perspectives, different understandings, and different ways of living.
Maybe that is true for everyone.
We know the world through the places we have been, the lives we have lived, and the things we have been able to experience. It is easy to mistake that small part of the world for the whole of it.
Sometimes, we forget that what feels ordinary to us might be extraordinary to someone else.
Or that what seems impossibly far away to us might be perfectly within reach for someone standing somewhere else.
I still think about that afternoon by the pool.
“It’s close.”
She was right.
It was close.
And yet, I had needed to go much farther away before I could experience just how close it was.
Perhaps distance is not always about how far we are from a place.
The place will always be there.
And sometimes, you just have to leave it behind to find it closer from farther away.