On Not Being An Absolutist About Shit

I took an airplane to India.

Yep, my whole project this year has been about going around the world overland — on trains, buses, boats, etc. — and yet I flew from Chiang Mai to Delhi.

I didn’t feel great about it. It turns out airports still suck. And I confirmed for myself that, yes, I do far prefer the gradual change in terrain, culture, and climate that overland travel affords vs the relatively instantaneous switch-flip of getting in a metal tube and getting off in another country.

But I’m also not beating myself up about it, and here’s why:

This was never a trip about “saving the world” by not flying or any such nonsense. I’m under no illusions about individual behaviors adding up to the titanic scale of change the world needs. They won’t and they never will. People aren’t going to spontaneously stop flying and start taking cargo ships across the ocean, no matter how cool I make it sound.

This was, instead, a trip about practice. That is, doing the thing — continuously, expecting neither a specific nor immediate outcome, but perhaps in the very long-term hope that the doing of it might change me subtly.

Relatedly, I think we should go easy on people and hard on systems. (Pretty sure that’s an old activist adage, but I’m not sure where it came from and my wifi is too spotty to google.) We need to change political economic systems more than our own individual behaviors, and we need masses of people on our side to do that. That means not guilt-tripping them about the many compromises they make to live in the modern world. And that means, also, going easy on ourselves sometimes too.

One of my goals for this trip was always don’t be an absolutist about shit. I’m trying not to eat a lot of meat, but I’ll eat whatever a gracious host puts in front of me. I’m trying to meditate every day, but lord knows that doesn’t always happen. I’m trying to go around the world without flying, but some things got in my way, and that’s OK.

I tried. I really hustled to find an operator that could take me on a “crossing tour” of Myanmar. A crossing tour is basically the only way you can enter Myanmar by landport via Thailand and exit by landport via India; it requires special permits, an official guide, and your own vehicle. For awhile there it looked like it’d work out and there’d be a crossing tour I could join (since I couldn’t go by myself due to the no-vehicle issue), but it ended up getting postponed till August, which was way too late for me.

Eventually, I have to get back to my life in the US. And, more immediately, I have to meet my husband in Nepal in July. We haven’t seen each other in months, and we’ve both been looking forward to this leg of my trip. In the end, being good to the people in your life that you love is way more important than any abstract ideal or practice.

So I took a plane to India. My window seat view flying out of BKK at dusk was really beautiful too.