“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”
~Dagobert D. Runes

There are many gifts of travel. First of all there is the sheer reminder of privilege. The privilege of having the means and the kind of life that allows leisure and the opportunity to step outside one’s regular day to day work and home life. There is the privilege of seeing places you may have, until this point, only read about or seen in magazines or on television. There is the privilege of tasting different foods, seeing foods unfamiliar or exotic. There is the privilege of seeing the handiwork and hard work of dreamers, architects, builders, laborers. So many reminders that the world in which we find ourselves is more vast and varied than our singular life.

For me one of the true privileges of travel is that it provides the time to notice. Mostly my noticing is done by observing the people around me. I don’t know about you but I think most people tend to ‘hang out’ with folks who are mostly like themselves. I know I do. Most of my friends and coworkers look much me, have a similar social and economic lifestyle, have a common educational background, and a certain set of shared values. It has, no doubt, been this way since humans walked the earth. We are a tribal people who find ways of sticking with our own. It is in our DNA.

Traveling allows me to observe and wonder about the lives of other people, people who don’t fit my tribal mold. Riding the subway in New York can be a rich place to do this. Yesterday I sat for quite some time as we rode for to our destination. Sharing our ride was a tall, young man who I believe to have been from an African country from his dress and skin color. In his hands he held a string of beads not unlike a rosary. While we zoomed along at tremendous underground speeds, his smooth, black hand moved the strand slowly from one bead to the next. Not knowing what the purpose of the beads were, I made the assumption they were prayer beads of some kind. I wondered at his prayers. What could they be? Gratitude? Hope? Comfort? Were they prayers of his former life or this one he finds himself living far from his homeland?

Not far from this man, a beautiful caramel skinned woman sat with her feet neatly and firmly planted on the floor. Like so many others all around, she held her Smartphone in her hand. But this young woman was not listening to music or flipping quickly through messages, text or otherwise. Instead, her lips were moving silently at a rapid pace as if reading something she knew from memory and was only using the screen of her phone to keep her focus. I watched as her full, smooth lips repeated some pattern over and over. Could it have been that she also was praying? Was it some repetitive,active prayer that kept her grounded in this fast paced, distracting world in which she lived?

Now I am not so naive as to think that everyone on the subway was in some form of prayer! That would only be my ‘church mind’ speaking. There was, of course, the muscular, well-sculpted man who had chosen to have an enormous sun bursting forth on his bicep until his dying day. There was the woman so bent over that she had to stop after several paces to rest her weighed down arms creating a rhythmic motion not unlike a crane’s dance. There were the children being pulled gently and frantically by adults as they made their way to work and daycare. There were lovers who could barely take their eyes off one another to make their way safely on and off the train. There were elders and babies, teenagers with attitudes and some who looked lost and lonely. There were riders who looked exhausted from the heat, their work, their lives.

We all traveled together in this tubular vehicle making our ways to whatever the day might hold. Some of us were on vacation and grateful for the change of scenery. Some were tired and frightened about what the day might bring. Some held no expectation at all, caught up in the mundane movements that moved them from sunrise to sunset. Some might have been praying.

This person was being washed in the gift of privilege and being blessed with the time to observe and notice, not only my own life, but those of my fellow world travelers.