I lived in the same city my entire life before coming to college. I traveled every now and then, but for the most part, Charleston was my world as a child. The rest of the world existed as individual places I had visited, all strung together somehow by the land and sea. As we grow older, trips don’t seem to take as long, the drives feel shorter and in general life moves more quickly. This is not so as a child, when the in-between times from point A to point B are arduous and taxing on our attention. This is the part of the world we pass by, the land and sea that maybe, one day, we will return to later.
It’s interesting how visual and even nearsighted the world is. Our immediate surroundings often dictate our immediate worries. While longer term preoccupations may always be in the back of our minds and outside issues present, the area we inhabit daily, the people we are constantly seeing and the activities we are regularly involved in determine our most pressing concerns. The rest of existence is there, but not right here.
This was very much the case when I was a child. The entire world seemed so huge that imagining it all was out of the question. We initially focus only on what we know and have seen, but our minds are drawn to the unknown. Our knowledge is small, and therefore everything seems so much bigger.
When I was young, we lived on a street with a median down the middle, separating both sides. At one end was a hill, and the other end led into the rest of the neighborhood. I played in my driveway, my backyard or on that street every day, not thinking too much about all the other places I could be. Riding my bike or my skateboard up and down that street seemed like all the fun I ever needed.
I grew a little and began to explore the neighborhood on my own. I no longer had to be in sight and I could discover the world for myself. In middle school, my family moved to another neighborhood relatively close by. I continued to search through this new territory. We rode bikes between friends’ houses and took them over to the water. As we grew bigger, the world grew smaller. The places connecting our ventures, the in-between spaces, became far more accessible.
Once the driver’s license came, everything changed. We had an access to a world we had never known before. I could go to school, go surfing, come home and hang out with friends, all without my parents’ involvement. On a whim, I could go much farther than my feet could take me. It was yet another step toward an independence in discovery.
Now, in college, the world is smaller still. I’m living in a different state, my sister is abroad in Spain and my other sister is working on her own. My family, once close together, has spread across the globe — so too with my friends. Such great change has taken place, but so naturally life has evolved. We are constantly shaped and prepared to enter the world independently — when we finally do, somehow we’re expected to fit.
I think we all wonder about our place in the world. It’s very easy to get caught up in specifics and hope for a clear answer, but that’s impossible. I had a conversation with a friend recently about the grand size of the universe — a subject that always blows my mind. When discussing that sort of thing, your own insignificance becomes painfully obvious. You realize this place that once seemed unthinkably large really is tiny in the grand scheme of things.
How can I have come from knowing so little of the earth to becoming a real part of it? Yet people born one after the other have grown and expanded their territory. The clock keeps time, but seems to move quicker and quicker over years as we experience more and more. Our knowledge increases because the more life we have, the more we are amazed by it. Then the kid roaming the neighborhood becomes the person roaming the earth. There is a place for everyone, and each stage of life has presented a place thus far. If you look where you are going, and in the places in between, they can’t be too hard to find in a world this small.
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