I’m riding on a bus somewhere between Philadelphia and Washington, DC. The sunlight gently enters the bus, which is somehow permeated by a twilight calm. People on the bus are so close together, elbows touching, breathing the same air, and yet, they sit eons apart. I feel like we’re all caught in a weird in-between state, some heads caressing the windows, looking for support; some eyes glued to phones and iPods; some hoods are up, with people staring in the distance, looking for unknown answers.
We’re completely anonymous—besides the few groups of people who know one another and subject the rest of us to their incessant conversations about nothing. Absolutely nothing. We drive through forest after forest, on smooth highways heading into the escaping sunlight. It feels like winter; it feels like timelessness; it feels like forever.
I’ve done a good deal of traveling this thanksgiving break. Driving on roads that seem to go nowhere, immersed in floods of traffic, car upon car upon car. The white lines that separate lanes of traffic seem to guide our destiny, entrusted to the bus driver whose name I don’t even know for the mere price of $25; the white lines flicker and continue ceaselessly, without fail.
As I sit on this bus going somewhere, I think back to a discussion I had with a friend, about people that lived hundreds of years ago and felt that their village was the centre of the universe. One could live one's entire life and see only 250 people. That’s it. 250 people.
How life has changed. I must have seen 500,000 people this trip alone. Easily. Riding a bus across DC. Swimming through travelers at Union Station. Boarding a bus to Philadelphia. Wading through people at the Philadelphia station. Riding train after train to New Jersey. Struggling through hundreds to board the New Jersey transit to New York. And then New York City itself—just count the hundreds and thousands that I saw in minutes, pouring up escalators, herding down sidewalks, adding up as the day progressed. In many ways those people really were nothing more than tallies, that don’t even begin to approach the significance of even one of the 250 villagers I might have known had I lived 400 years ago.
And now I travel back in this sea of anonymity to DC, back from New Jersey, back from Philadelphia. Sometimes I think that all my traveling over the past four years has destroyed that girl I was, leaving Kansas sometime ago. I’m exactly the same. Yet untethered, a bit lost, with a shifting sense of reality. Here I am traveling into a sunset in some unidentified state. Sitting next to my roommate, the only person holding me down to earth at the moment.
I’ve had such a spectacular thanksgiving break, as I usually do, far from home but adopted by friends and their families. Somehow it is precisely when I am in moving vehicles that I realize my own mobility, the fluidity of my life. I hunger for a map that would tally the miles I have walked and journeyed in my life, to have these trips to Smalltown, Suburban, USA documented. I think about the people who, but for the grace of God, I never would have encountered, met, loved; I think of the huge network of connections that link me to people all across the globe; I think that some of my best reflecting occurs when I feel aimless and anonymous, in some foreign land, even if it be an unknown road in Pennsylvania.
I don’t want to go back and confront all my work for school. I don’t want to allow this semester to slip past me. I don’t want to accept the fact that soon I will begin all over again. Persistently I’ve had this feeling that God holds me in the palm of His hand. Even in the middle of nowhere, even when I’m confronting the results of my own actions, even when I feel vulnerable and alone, He picks me up and sends me a sign that I will never be alone. Even when I question if that life of only knowing 250 people in total would have been somehow better and easier and simpler. Whatever road I travel, whomever I meet, wherever I end up, He will be.
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