Where There Are No Worries

Came back home feeling small, not that I’m complaining. Being full of oneself comes naturally in a society as individualistic as ours. Travel is about the only tonic that can bring down the swelling.

More stenographer than author as I write this, taking dictation, transcribing thoughts that formed more than a third of the world’s circumference away, after journeying 8,300 miles, awestruck and humbled upon arrival at the destination, how enormous it is, how positively miniscule I am by comparison. No one encountered there seemed to give even a moment’s thought to the cares and concerns and dramas that you and I find so vitally important. My home, my life, so consequential to me, irrelevant to them.

I’ve spent some 850 days in Africa, give or take a few, still feel I know little of it. I suspect I could spend 850 lifetimes there and not know half its grandeur or a tenth of its secrets. This visit brought my travel party of six to a part of the continent previously unfamiliar to me. Starte…