APRIL 7, FRIDAY

SHARING YOUR TRIP

On Friday I went to my Friday men’s group at the CornerStone restaurant where we meet once a month for a full breakfast, the other three Fridays we drink senior coffee at McDonalds.

My group was glad to see me and some had even been reading my daily posts. And I told them a little about my trip and soon the conversation went on to other things.

I, and anyone else who has traveled, even my fellow Friday coffee drinkers, have experienced this shift in interest when we have something important to report. Whenever I took a group of students to India for two or four months, we would make a group report to the community, and the students’ roommates and friends would attend. We would show slides and tell our story. But we were really doing this for ourselves, not for our friends, it was our one chance, maybe, to be heard.

The usual experience for me and for everyone who has traveled is for someone to ask, “How was your trip?” “Fine,” we would answer, “I had a great time.” And that was it. You had two to four months of intense experience each day and wanted to share it, but all there was time for was to say, fine. There are probably two reasons for this. Each of us is in our own bubble and are consumed by our own day to day events and experiences. This is what we old men talk about in our Friday coffee hour, what concerns us at the time. So it is very hard to shift to an experience by someone else of a place that we know nothing about.

But the other reason is that it is very hard to share an experience that has touched you so deeply. How do you share this with someone else? You can show a few photographs, but it is almost impossible to put into words what your experience was and how it touched you. That is probably, come to think of it, a main reason for my writing these daily posts. People still cannnot know what I experienced in Haarlem, but I can slow down and try to put my experience into words whether people want to read what I write or not. I am not doing it so much for them as for myself and my need to share, which is greater for me than the need for anyone I am sharing with to be shared with.

One reason I and others say, “fine”, even when we would like to share is that it is so hard to share. We know that the other person is perhaps only being polite, but we also know that we couldn’t put into words our experience in a way that they could feel as deeply, so it is a relief to say “fine” and turn the conversation to something else less difficult.

But a major reason, for me, for sharing my experience is that in putting it into words I am also sorting it out for myself. That is a pleasurable activity, just as responding to my experience in photographs is a pleasurable activity and is a way of holding onto this experience and looking back on it later.