Report from Iceland – the final transition

I’m winding up my amazing six week odyssey sitting in the Reykjavik Iceland airport on an eight hour layover. After strolling everywhere there is to stroll (this is not a particularly large airport), eating some lunch (smoked salmon and dill, of course…), and shopping (wool scarf and birch liqueur, plus some fish jerky – Viking food for my son Conrad), I find I still have a good five hours before boarding.

What to do? I am in the middle of a good book (Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng – highly recommended, by the way), but it is much more fun at the moment sitting in the middle of the main thoroughfare where everyone must pass to get to the bathrooms, food, shopping, and departure gates. I flew in on WOW Airways, a great airline known for cheap fares and few frills. A wonderful mix of people are constantly passing before me. Many of the flights out of Iceland are headed for the US, so there is a lot of American English being spoken all around me, mixed in with many other languages, of course, a key feature of any international airport. Lots of big groups of young people traveling together – sports teams? musicians? church youth groups? who knows? Lots of families, lots of older people as well, many of them also in tour groups. A number of people traveling alone, like me.

What better time to add one final post to The Kindness Continuum? When I get back, I plan to continue blogging, but the focus will necessarily change. I expect I will continue to use my personal experiences as a jumping off point, but my hope is that the scope of interest in the blog will change and expand as I continue to explore the topic of kindness and its place in the world at large from different perspectives. (Important Note: I also invite anyone interested to submit a guest blog. I would love for The Kindness Continuum to include articles from different perspectives in addition to my own.)

So here are a few observations and reflections on my entire six week experience, in no particular order:

1. Being on the move for days on end can be both exhilarating and exhausting. I would do it all again in a heartbeat, but I admit I am really looking forward to being back in my own cozy home, seeing my friends and family again, and getting back into some semblance of a routine. The anticipated kindnesses that I predicted in the article I posted before taking the trip did indeed come to fruition. I am convinced that the world is in large part a very kind place, with people looking out for each other, respecting each other, and often going out of their way to favor someone else even when it is neither expected nor needed (and even when it is somewhat of a personal sacrifice or hardship for the person doing the favor). My generalized observation is that most of us simply want to live our lives, explore the world (however we define the boundaries of our world), and connect with others, whether family or strangers. I saw evidence of this over and over again, and it gives me hope. In future blogs I hope to examine how this gentleness and kindness on the part of the “masses” seems to get hijacked by the relative few that end up controlling how we live our lives. I can’t shake the feeling that if our kinder natures were nurtured rather than squashed, the world would be a better place. How to get us there is the question that has nagged at me for most of my life.
2. Ethiopia, Tanzania, Qatar, England, Ireland, Germany, Romania, Iceland – these are the countries I touched while on my trip. Granted, some of you might not count the airports as true visits, but I am including them because my layovers added texture and interest to the trip that would not have otherwise been there. It gave me a window onto the traveling world that I am not often exposed to. Many of you are no doubt much more seasoned travelers than I but for me, spending time in any airport provides a unique type of traveling experience.

   

   On the one hand everyone there is headed somewhere else, whether within or outside that country.But on the other hand, each airport is a reflection of the country in which it sits – the culture and personality of the people who design, run and work at that airport, the food available between flights, wares you see in the shops that extol the virtues of the particular country, and the passengers who pass through the airport located in that particular corner of the world. I love strolling around and observing the people and families rushing about, trying to get checked in, scurrying to their gates, dutifully emptying their pockets and bags of liquids, metal and electronics before passing through security, or simply sitting at the gate waiting to board. There is a “cattle call” aspect to all the waiting in lines, and the exhaustion is sometimes all too apparent in the faces of the weary passengers. Many of the travelers are indistinguishable from each other, but every now and again someone passes by and you think to yourself, “Mmm…that person looks interesting,” and you wonder what it might be like to get to know them better.

   

   On one of my flights I sat next to an opera singer. The only way I know this (because we did not have a conversation the entire flight) is because as soon as the doors to the plane were closed and we settled in for the takeoff, he got out his sheet music, opened the booklet, and began softly singing to himself. I didn’t want to disturb him so I furtively stole glances at his paper to see what it was, and believe he was practicing a part for the “Marriage of Figaro.” How cool was that?

3. The people I met and observed, as well as their cultures and physical environments, were endlessly fascinating. This is true for me in the United States as well, I should also add. The difference is that the environments I was in on this trip were less familiar to me, and so the people of those places were also less familiar to me. Since I seem to thrive on being exposed to new experiences and thoughts and ideas that expand my personal horizons, this trip was made to order for me in that respect. The people of each place I visited were generous in their willingness to let me invade their lives, whether literally, in the form of inviting me into their home for a time, or more figuratively, in the form of allowing me to visit and photograph various aspects of my experience and theirs.

   

   This truly made the overall trip much more meaningful for me. I don’t trust my memory to capture all that this trip had to offer, and so found myself taking pictures incessantly. I didn’t want to miss anything, and everything I encountered had a uniqueness to it.

4. This trip was a personal pilgrimage of sorts, as those of you who have been following me from the beginning know. The impetus that drove me out the door and over the ocean was the loss of my husband and my need to figure out how I was going to live without him and who that new person was going to be. I don’t know that I have figured all that out yet, and honestly don’t know that I ever will. The grief continues to bubble up at both expected and unexpected times. But I did discover a few things about myself.

   

   For example, thankfully I still have an appreciation of humorous situations and can laugh at myself.  It is also apparent that my family is more important than ever, and loving relationships with family and friends are their own reward, transcending any struggles or hardships we may encounter. Perhaps most importantly, I also discovered that I still have the ability to enjoy what life has to offer and that my curiosity about the world at large is still intact. I’m afraid this discovery manifested itself in a rather expensive way. The photos I took turned out not to be enough to truly capture the memories. It turned out that I also needed items a bit more tangible and three dimensional.

   

   I don’t really consider myself a compulsive spender in general, but I ended up sending home two boxes of items purchased while away, and my suitcase is similarly loaded. To make everything fit, at the end I left several pairs of shoes and various items of clothing behind. If this isn’t a sign of my survival instinct kicking in and encouraging me to continue thriving, I don’t know what is. (Jay would definitely not have approved…)

5. I have become curious about how the countries I visited are able to seamlessly mix the old with the new and find a balance and level of cultural pride that seems to transcend the constant push for “progress” and industrialization and corporate control over everything. Tanzania still has so much to overcome in terms of poverty, infrastructure, and population density.

   

   In Ireland the modern industrialized world is apparent everywhere, especially in the cities. Romania is still recovering from a relatively difficult post-WWII era and seems to be changing rapidly. Yet in each of these three countries I saw everyday people living everyday lives while still relying on the “old ways,” the simpler technologies and nomadic lifestyles such as herding cattle and goats (Tanzania), or using scythes to cut wheat and load it onto wagons drawn by horses (Romania), or small farmers in small villages hundreds of years old tilling the same soil and herding their sheep the same way in the same places their forefathers did (Ireland). But these are not simple, backward folk. They drive cars, they have cell phones, they are fully participating in the “modern world” in many, many ways. But they aren’t chastised or seen as oddities by the rest of their countrymen (at least from what I could tell from my severely limited perspective). They are embraced by the larger society and allowed to just go about their lives in their own way (while still being subject to the rule of law in that country, of course). In the United States, I believe the closest thing we have to people similarly living off the land would be the Amish, and they are pretty isolated from the rest of us and have spurned modern technologies. Native Americans might be another group that has tried to hang on to more traditional practices, but theirs is a complicated history of deprivation and oppression and suppression of culture by our government.

   

   Which is my point, I guess. In the United States we (as a culture, society and government) have made it pretty difficult for the simpler lifestyles and simpler technologies to thrive, while in the countries I visited those simpler practices were woven into the fabric of the modern world. As a result, the culture (to my mind, anyway), had a bit more texture, and implied a level of acceptance and tolerance that is not as apparent in the U.S.

So much for my musings in the airport. I was one of the first arrivals this morning, and while I have been writing this blog the airport became thick with the thousands of passengers pouring into the concourse, eating and shopping, and heading out again to their next stop. My turn is coming. Now, several hours later, the airport is almost empty again, but I still have over 2 1/2 hours to wait before I can board my flight. Time to swing through the duty free shop one more time, grab a bottle of water, and settle down with my book. See you on the flip side of the Atlantic!