Like all of you, I love travel. I miss it. The planning, the hopefulness, the possibilities of learning something new, seeing something that I’ve never seen before. Travel is exciting! It makes the world smaller. It puts other lives in front of us and has the potential to make us consider new things. But, as we’ve recognized over the past year, living through all the layers of tragic news one on top of another suffocates our desire or even ability to get out there. We are stripped of the opportunities we previously took for granted to get out, to learn and to explore differences. But if we’re honest, do we really need to leave home to do that? Take a minute and explore this with me …

In our current confinement, we’re reaching out through technology to help combat isolation. We can be optimistic about how technology brings the world closer together. I don’t want to deny that as examples abound. My friend holds interviews online and hires staff she has never physically met for remote jobs that will never require a brick and mortar space. My husband is living proof that we can buy products from any continent and have them shipped to our door. I’ve written for other bloggers who are hosting sites from the UAE to Australia to Texas. Technology serves, much the way travel does, to make global connections more standard.

This evolution is even more evident in the latest generation. They adopt its use readily, increasingly using it for socialization and collaboration not bound by geography. This difference between my generation and their’s is glaringly obvious to me. I moved so many times as a child and each was an uprooting of life, tears were shed. There were promises to write. I would not see these people for years or ever again. Huge nervous efforts were made to create new connections in new places. Today my son’s friend announced he’s moving and it was met with disappointment (“I would’ve liked to have seen him at school”) and a shrug (“We’ve still got Discord.”).

Yet even as I write this I’m aware of the privilege that swims in those paragraphs. Much like we reflect on who really gets to take advantage of travel, we reflect on who gets to use this technology so fluidly. Our local schools are struggling to keep their heads above water to provide equitable access to technology. Education now finally forced to reckon with the fact that only the very few middle class families in a given district have the ability to compensate for a lack of shared statewide infrastructure. An insight a bit late in coming.

So how does this connect to travel making the world a smaller place?

Dr. Ana Taranath, author of Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World points out that the majority of Americans live in neighborhoods that are predominantly a reflection of one socio-economic group. Meaning the average American citizen is experiencing day to day life in a homogenous environment. While a few miles in any given direction there may be a neighborhood dominated by another homogenous grouping of a completely different kind living a vastly different experience. If we are craving travel to see difference, we may only need to travel a matter of minutes. In our work with school districts my husband and I have seen the reality of this first hand. In our experience being a part of a multicultural family we’ve seen how awkward and difficult it can be to discuss glaring differences when they arise.

We’re itching to spend on average three to four figures to get our family out into the world again but when do we explore the differences within our own areas? In a country sometimes characterized by images of melting pots, silenced personal histories, and villainization of the other, do we even know how?

Yes, technology can help remove geographical boundaries and, by default, open up more of the world to us. Yes, eventually physical travel will expose us again to new cultures, new people, new ideas. But as any teacher can tell you, exposure doesn’t equal education. We can take others to another destination, either virtually or physically, but do we know how to discuss thoughtfully the differences we see there? As my husband and I plan for an upcoming trip, do we even know how to help our children negotiate the differences witnessed closer to home? I’d like to hold a space for that conversation here. It may be strange, it may be messy, but I can’t deny how this book has compelled me to share and reach out for others to share in kind.

I’m holding space for the questions. I don’t have the answers.