A Short Walk Through a Wide World

by Douglas Westerbeke

Now she knew, without a doubt, that she did not command the world, but was at the mercy of it. It’s a lesson most people learn at some point in their lives, but the realization that the world is a bigger and more powerful thing than you are, learned in such a merciless way, was a lot for a proud twelve-year-old girl to come to grips with, so suddenly, and with such little room for error.

The more you move,” says Aubry, “the more available you are to chance and little wonders.”

“If you do nothing else in life, learn a skill,” she tells them. “One useful skill people need. That will get you far.”

Perhaps her illness is a rejection of the sedentary life, her body rebelling against an inertia that mankind has, over the millennia, eased itself into.

And perhaps that’s the purpose of travel, to sift out the familiar from the foreign, to unearth those moments that remind us of home.

“There are things on this earth that only exist because you have beheld them. If you weren’t there, they would never have been.”

“I’ve given up trying to understand. I think I’ll just let it all quietly overwhelm me.”

Scholars may study, historians may research, readers may read, but nobody knows more about today, this very day, than the person who lives it.