Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 36

I am getting ready for my annual trip, my month in Latin America. It will be a month of Spanish immersion, of being away from the familiar, away from work, from friends and neighbours and clients and colleagues. It should be, and I expect it to be, a month of rest. I will be in Costa Rica. My fifth visit to that country. I will spend most of my time in Monteverde. My fifth time in that region. Why this tendency of returning to the same place over and over? Is this a fear of the unknown placing a control over the adventure and novelty of travel? I don't think so. I have a tendency of connecting and bonding with places and with people. I have mentioned elsewhere on these pages that I try not to think in terms of bucket lists. To me the bucket list is a problematic symptom of a consumerist and very selfish and narcissistic culture, something that I simply do not want to participate in. Simply put, Gentle Reader, if we want to begin to be agents of healing for our troubled and traumatized humanity, then we have to stop treating persons as commodities or as novelties. I have leveled this criticism from time to time at brainless tourists in my own Vancouver, when they become so caught up in their selfies and photo ops that it is not very clear to them that they are visiting a place where people live their lives, and I just tell them sometimes, "People live here, you know." For example, these idiots obstructing the sidewalk for their photos and those dumb but nice locals who indulgently walk around them so they can have their little tourist moment. Well, I think that tourists need to be educated. I do not change my route in order to accommodate or compensate for that half of their brain they leave in their luggage. I walk right past them, in front of their phone or camera, if I have to (it's never fully intentional!) and if they even dare to protest (they seem to know better not to), I simply give my sweetest Canadian smile and chime: "Umm, people live here, you know." For some reason, I simply am never inclined to sweeten the passive-aggressive rebuke with that classic Canadian, "Sorry." Recently, I have also had to remind similar visiting dumbasses while hogging the sidewalk on the Granville Bridge or the trail in Stanley Park, that "Sharing the sidewalk (path) is very good." It's their free ESL de jour. Some of them are actually rude about it, since they likely come from countries that do not have a culture of public civility, but most are downright decent about it (they don't know if I might be armed!) And this is the way it is when I am a guest in someone else's parlour. I am integrating among local people, speaking their language (Spanish), befriending anyone who makes themselves befriendable, eating in local places, and simply making myself as invisible as possible while observing the people around me, talking with strangers and learning about the city, the country, the people, the culture, the local trends, the politics, the mores and social expectations, the local ecology, a little bit of everything. I have made some pretty awesome friends this way, in Mexico, in Costa Rica, and in Colombia, almost all of them are local people, save for one, a visitor like me whom I met in a bed and breakfast in Mexico City, and to this day, almost ten years later we are still friends and still in touch with each other. This kind of travel also carries a rather steep learning curve, and mistakes are going to be made along the way, as any readers of my travel blogs will remember. I think that the internet has done a lot to make the world a small place, and this for some of us can really help facilitate a sense of global community. I think that as more of us become brave enough to learn new languages and travel alone in other countries with the express purpose of catalyzing community, then maybe we can also, through our own tiny steps, help facilitate a move towards greater global peace, harmony and reconciliation. And no one even has to sing Kumbaya, nor hum it, nor even (please, God, NO!!!!), whistle it.