Traveling Gripes and Graces

As much as I complain about how much I travel, I have to admit how much I actually like it. I think sometimes my complaining becomes a camouflaged form of bragging. Sure, travel gets tiring and the recovery time after a trip takes longer with each mile. But I love the sense of the unexpected, the array of new faces and old friends, and fact that I can say, "I've been there."

During my trip 6,500 mile (10,000+ km) trip last week to Rwanda via Kenya, I was on the return leg somewhere over Sudan or Chad or Niger in a Kenya Airways 737 when I was reading from a book called Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan (2005). Franklin Cook, a long-time Nazarene missionary and director in Eurasia, guided me toward this book last year. I'd read Kaplan's articles in Atlantic Monthly since 2001 and another of his books entitled Warrior Politics (2003). Here is the bit on the ambivalence of traveling life that caught my attention:

"Within half an hour of leaving Gardez [a small town in Afganistan] I was matted with dust and my day pack had turned from black to solid brown. I was fifty-one years old. Why was I doing this? I was full of doubt my last night amid the pampered luxury of Dubai. In Bagram [a large US Army base], the night before flying to Gardez, I was again doubtful. But now the past and future, and every other place on the planet besides here, did not exist. I was living completely for the moment: the ultimate happiness. Every trip followed the same pattern." [page 214]

I am continually struck by how Kaplan's analysis in this book rings true with the missionary life, though he may be surprised to hear that it does. The good and bad news is: no trips on my schedule for another two weeks.