Carry-On Should Not Exceed
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” Jean- Jacques Rousseau
Do you remember when you last prepared for a trip to a place you had never been?
Last summer, with no end in sight to quarantine, I pulled out my travel bags, opened every suitcase and let them sit in the sun. That’s a ritual I used to perform routinely after returning from a trip. Now these bags, stored for so long, seemed bigger than necessary and lost in their purpose. Would I ever use them again?
In the BC (before Corona) world, this cleaning intervention would have qualified as a Mari Kondo action (Mari Kondo, a self described “tidying expert,” published numerous books on how to get rid of things). In the context of COVID it felt different. The act of bringing the luggage out of storage was far from practical. It had no reason and I could have spent the time in a much more useful way. It was a purely sentimental and archeological act — a ritual. Holding the bags and suitcases in my hand, my body recalled the act of traveling. The handle of the bag in my hand unlocked specific memories, transporting me to places I traveled to with this particular bag.
A year later, I am still sorting through my belongings. As I hold each book and pen, each half-used notebook from my kids’ school, I ask myself whether it is a BC relic or useful in the new paradigm of sweatpants, zoom meetings, NFTs, and Artificial Intelligence.
The process of envisioning what would be useful after arriving in an unknown land reminds me of when I prepared for my travels to Antarctica via the Drake passage.
“Will I need the warmest down jacket in Antarctica? Will I use all three notebooks, read four books on the boat? How many extra socks will I need?” As you’ll probably guess, I needed much less than I thought, but the extra warm down jacket gave me comfort.
After my grandfather lost both his vineyard and his home during the Second World War, he was confined in war prison simply for being the wrong nationality. Miraculously, years later, he found his way back to our family. He said that we should study and learn since nobody can take that from us.
My grandfather started a new vineyard. The small plot he tended gave him a sense of home. It was a sliver of the familiar that allowed him to practice his art and further his knowledge, the only “things” he was able to bring with him.
I am grateful that I don’t live in the midst of a war, that I don’t need to be on the run. Those circumstances that left my family with nothing but their thoughts and knowledge. Rather, I hold the privilege and the responsibility to do the sorting and editing of belongings myself.
Here, now, I am thankful for the time and the space to contemplate each piece, remembering and digesting the past while preparing for a future that is slowly moving into focus. While I most likely will continue to exercise in a gym with a face-mask on, and to meet with collaborators via Zoom, I also envision being transported by a self-driving vehicle to my favorite restaurant where the sommelier invites to a journey to another place via a glass of wine. I will smell and taste the soil and the grape, and connect to the people who made this wine. It will bring me closer to my grandfather, who died of skin cancer from too much sun, to his vineyard and to his skilled hands.
