It’s 8:30am as I begin writing this post. Just minutes ago Kathi and our son trotted off towards the University of Bergen, where she’ll drop him off for his last day at Nygard Skole — the Norwegian immersion program he’s attended this year — before going to her last day at the University. My daughter shook a leg in a perpendicular direction to her last day at Rothaugen, where she has been in an immersion class embedded in the local junior high.
Our adventure is ending: my kids have been in 10 countries in 10 months: USA, Norway, Netherlands, Poland, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Germany and Italy. They are closer to being world citizens now, and the travel bug has bitten them. I wait with fascination to watch them readjust to life in our small town south of Portland after being able to jet off to Rome for a weekend.
Now, I sit on the couch with the kitchen ravages of the morning waiting for me to order them, after which I’ll return to packing, organizing, scanning, pruning and getting ready for our crack-of-dawn departure back to America on Monday.
Home. We’re going home, first to visit family and friends in Los Angeles, then up to Portland a few days later.
Already, our 4-story, narrow, weird little 400-year-old house doesn’t look like us. The books are gone, and a Berens without books is extraterrestrial. We shipped six boxes yesterday, and this was after I schlepped an extra suitcase and bag of books to New York with me a few weeks ago on a business trip to UPS westward at lower cost.
Other changes: the quintet resumed being our standard Berens quartet when Jordan, our beloved nanny who also works for me in the business, left on her European walkabout while I was in New York. The house got a bit quieter.
We measure in wake-ups: how many more times will we wake up in Bergen? The answer as of now is three: Saturday, Sunday, Monday wheels up. Our year-long presence falls from the house fast as an oak shakes off last leaves at autumn’s end… even though Norwegian summer is just starting to peek through the clouds here.
We have so much stuff, even in this pared down year. We’ll travel to Los Angeles with straining duffles and carryons. Despite buying digital books and music, being careful about what we acquire, scanning papers and then disposing of the originals… we’re still fleshy beings in a world of plastic, cloth, wood and concrete. Friends are adopting our houseplants. We’ve given outgrown clothes to charity. Still we have to manage things. Many things.
So the world is a lot less virtual than we think it is, and not just in the sense of “gosh, what a lot of stuff we have.”
When we moved to Bergen back in August I knew I’d be far away, but I thought that with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Skype and Google Hangouts and email and a Vonage/VOIP phone things would chug along.
In many ways, they did. Facebook and Twitter helped me to keep an ambient awareness of what was happening with friends, and vice versa. Many people have told me how they’ve enjoyed watching our European adventure unfold in picture after picture on Facebook.
But a chasm lies between recent-time Facebook updates and live conversations with family, friends and business associates. Distance shatters immediacy, and the nine-hour time difference between Bergen and Portland is even harder to bridge than the geography. Numberless times I’ve had to sacrifice either a meeting with business partners or dinner with the family because 9am in California is 6pm in Norway. The numbers never added up.
After a while, I got used to the distance and forgot how different live could be.
Then, in May, I went back to Brown University for the first time for my 25th college reunion to renew acquaintance with classmates and campus. I stayed in the dorms, which are no habitat for middle-aged bodies— each morning, the bleary shuffle from dorm to bathroom by coffee-deprived grownups (myself included) was near-slapstick comedy. We all wandered the campus in endless combinations, trading lifetimes of anecdotes. Often, I couldn’t recognize an older friend by looking, but when we walked, when the unchanged voice came from next to me, the years fell away.
After the reunion I went down to New York for a week of conferences. Handshakes, hugs, smiles, meals shared, beer bottles clinked, knowing expressions traded, walks in the June sunlight: these things change, deepen and amplify interaction more than mere adverbs can capture.
I shouldn’t be surprised by this: I’ve spent more than a decade programming conferences that exist because real relationships require real presence to start, bloom and mature. The highest bandwidth signal we have is when we’re sitting across a table from others, feeling their bodies shift the air, hearing the crinkle of their clothes as well as their voices, noticing the new haircut, new age line, new cadence or habitual word choice. Those things aren’t noise: they compose a richer signal.
The world is a lot less virtual than we think.
The dishes await, as do more boxes. Tonight, friends visit. More packing over the weekend, a last trek up Fløyen to say goodbye to the fjord on Sunday.
You only know it’s an adventure when it’s over.
We’re going home.
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