We were just sitting by the pool.
Nothing particularly meaningful was being discussed.
Just the kind of conversation that happens between strangers staying at the same hotel.
Where are you from?
How long are you staying?
Is this your first time here?
At some point, I mentioned that many people from her country come here.
She said:
“Yes, it’s close.”
That was probably all she meant.
There was no deeper meaning behind it.
She wasn’t trying to explain anything.
It was just a perfectly ordinary answer.
But somehow, I kept thinking about it.
It’s close.
Yes.
But then I wondered:
Does that go both ways?
If people from one place come here because it’s close, shouldn’t people from here also be going there for the same reason?
Not necessarily in equal numbers.
People don’t travel somewhere simply because it’s nearby. They travel because there’s something there that interests them, something they want to see, experience, or discover.
And I don’t think there is any place in the world that has absolutely nothing to interest anyone. What attracts one person might mean nothing to another, but somewhere, someone will find a reason to go.
People cross oceans to see things they couldn’t find at home, to experience a different way of life, or simply to satisfy their curiosity.
When distance isn’t enough
If people don’t seem to travel in the opposite direction as often, maybe the reason has little to do with distance itself.
I thought about places that are close to each other where people really do travel in both directions. You can see people from one side visiting the other, and people from the other side doing the same.
In those cases, being close certainly helps. The two places might offer different things, but both give people a reason to make the journey.
I guess that is what most people might think.
Then there are places that are similarly close, but the movement of people seems much more one-sided.
The distance on the map is almost the same.
The movement of people isn’t.
That made me wonder whether closeness is sometimes less about distance.
And perhaps sitting there by the pool made that thought more noticeable.
Everyone around me had, in one way or another, managed to get there.
Some had traveled only a few hours.
Others had traveled for nearly a whole day.
They had all come from somewhere else, from distances both short and long.
But once they arrived, none of that was visible anymore.
Everyone was simply sitting around the same pool.
A child was playing in the water.
Someone was reading.
Someone was having a drink.
People were talking, taking photos, enjoying the afternoon.
From inside the hotel, it was easy to think of everyone there simply as people who had managed to come from somewhere else.
A different kind of distance
Later, when I stepped outside the hotel, I noticed a mother and her young child near the entrance, asking people for money.
At first, it was just something happening outside the place where we were staying.
But I had already been thinking about who gets to go where, and suddenly the contrast became difficult not to notice.
The young child looked to be around the same age as one of the children I had seen playing in the pool.
One child had been playing in the water, probably too young to remember it years later.
Now, another child was sitting outside with her mother, asking people for money.
They were only a few meters apart, separated by the walls and entrance of the hotel.
Yet the circumstances surrounding their lives seemed so different.
Neither child had chosen where they were born.
Neither had decided what kind of circumstances they would grow up in.
I didn’t know what either child’s life was like beyond those brief moments I had seen them.
And I began to wonder about something else.
Would the children inside the hotel ever see the child outside?
Not necessarily that afternoon. Not necessarily through the same window or at the same moment I had seen them.
But perhaps, at some point during their stay, they would pass through the entrance and notice each other.
Perhaps they already had.
I had seen both groups, but at different times. I was the one who had carried those two scenes in my mind and placed them next to each other.
Would anyone else do the same?
Would a child playing in the pool ever think about the child sitting outside the hotel?
Would the child outside ever become curious about the children who came and went through the entrance?
Or would they simply pass through each other’s lives without ever giving it much thought?
I don’t know.
Maybe they would notice each other. Maybe they wouldn’t.
Maybe the difference would mean something to one child and nothing at all to the other.
What struck me was that I had been able to see both situations, while the children themselves might never have connected them.
I could see the contrast because I had been in both places.
But seeing two lives from the outside doesn’t mean understanding either of them.
We don’t know what someone else considers normal.
We don’t know what they want.
We don’t know what they imagine their life could be.
We can observe the circumstances surrounding another person, but we cannot simply assume that we know what those circumstances mean to them.
What we cannot see
It started with a very ordinary sentence.
“It’s close.”
And I still think she was right.
It was close.
But maybe there are different kinds of distance.
There is the distance between a nearby town and a distant city.
The distance between two countries.
The distance between one side of a border and the other.
There is also the distance between a place that interests us and a place that doesn’t.
And then there is the distance between a place we know and a place we have never been.
There is also the distance between what is possible for one person and what is possible for another.
That last distance is harder to see. It doesn’t always show up on a map, and it isn’t always something we can understand just by looking at someone else’s life.
Sometimes two people can be standing only a few meters apart and still be living in completely different circumstances.
Sometimes two places can be close enough to reach in a few hours, yet one feels like a destination while the other barely enters our thoughts.
Perhaps being close is not simply about how far away something is.
Perhaps it is also about whether we have a reason to go there, whether we can imagine ourselves there, and whether going there is even a possibility for us.
Perhaps “close” was never really about distance in the first place.
Perhaps you just have to ask, “Does that go both ways?”
This thought continued in a later article, Closer, From Farther Away.