The Distance

As I make preparations to take the almost-1,600 mile trip to my new home for the next two years, I've been struck by just how small our world seems. Like essentially every grammar school student, I learned that before the advent of automobiles and airplanes travel was almost unheard of. Until the past century, people rarely traveled, and those who did rarely made it more than a few miles from where they were born. Sure, there are examples of those who ended up far from home, like Magellan's translator (i.e. slave), Enrique, who circumnavigated the globe in stages, but we have been taught that such cases were rare.

As a student, it was always fun to contrast how far the average farmer traveled in a lifetime with how far we could travel by car in a single day. In comparison to the medieval peasant, the car-less farmer of the 1920's or the Englishmen who landed at Jamestown, our world is huge. With Skype, we can see the face of a loved one hundreds of miles away, and Facebook and instant messenger programs have replaced the slow-moving, handwritten letter with the instant and impersonal one-liners. And of course, with Google Maps, I can view the entire world by satellite. It stands to reason that my world, unlike the world of the pilgrim, farmer, or peasant, is limitless. But I'm not so sure anymore.


I was never good at naming states and capitols. Besides New Hampshire, I could spot California, Maine, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Texas, Michagan, Alaska, and Massachusetts. I could also always pick out Kansas- it was that square one, smack dab in the middle! Topeka was its capital, but beyond that, it never entered into my thoughts much during school.

Now though, Kansas is very much on my mind. I've stared at road maps, and aerial maps, I've looked at digital photos, spoken to real live Kansans, and I've even searched for videos to figure out what their accent might sound like. Thanks to the internet, I've prepared myself more for this move than any of my ancestors could have, but it still seems so...foreign.

And that's the thing. We have so much information and so much access to other places, that we forget distance. But whether you live in the 21st century or the 14th, a thousand miles is still a thousand miles, and you still have to decide how you will bridge the distance between here and there.