Just a week from now I will be arriving in India, a place that has been on my travel list for so long that I have forgotten when I first thought of it. It seems unreal.
When I was a kid growing up in the small town of Havana, Illinois I had heard of people taking vacations, although I knew few people who actually did so. The people I knew who had traveled to other countries were the military people who had served in WWII or Korea. As a soldier, my older brother was stationed in Germany and traveled through Europe on his leaves, but I didn't have the impression that he wanted to be anywhere but home. I never dreamed that I would ever travel anywhere. I could not imagine how that might happen. I was actually afraid to go to a big city. I was sure I would get lost or mugged or something else bad would happen to me. It wasn't until I was already married and traveled to New York City for a group therapy training workshop that I finally realized that I could get around town and experience new things without actually dying in the attempt. I have found that I actually like exploring new places, even places full of people, like the big cities of the world. With my wife, I visited every state in the US and most of the provinces of Canada. We traveled to Ecuador, Peru, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico and St. Martin together. After her passing, I continued my travels, going to Australia, Cambodia, Thailand, China, Jordan, Egypt, Costa Rica and Aruba, sometimes with friends and sometimes making new friends of the people I found myself traveling with. Not bad for a kid from a town of 4000 people in the heart of Illinois.
Now I'm headed to India and will be traveling with 15 other people, none of whom I have met yet. However I know that I will have new friends when I return and that I'll have experiences I will enjoy sharing with my friends and family at home. I have also become aware that my experiences and behaviors will mean very little in the over-all scheme of things. Oh, there will be some minor economic impact both at home and wherever I travel and I will meet some new people and share their perspectives about things as I hope they will share my own. Yet, the primary impact will be on my own fund of knowledge and state of mind. And I am only one insignificant person in the grand scheme of the Universe. What happens to me is of very minor importance to anybody but me. I have made my mark, for whatever worth that has, through teaching, mentoring, doing psychotherapy, supervising trainees, doing accreditation visits to counseling centers, publishing a few professional articles, raising my children and being as good a person as I can manage with all of my flaws. This web site is my one last attempt at leaving something of myself to whatever posterity follows me. Even that will fade away after I die and the blog disappears from the web. I can't say that I'm really very disappointed. I came much farther than I ever dreamed I would when I was a kid back in that little town in central Illinois.