The Shrinking World
In some respects we age in place. Time revolves around us, but we never can pinpoint the specific moment we’ve aged.
We don’t remember the first wrinkles that form on our foreheads, or the first bags under our eyes. They just appear. Somehow the skin must have started to sag and stretch, but the movement itself is invisible to the naked eye. We age in place, and the world around us moves.
I am on the closing end of a wonderful trip to Spain to see dear friends. I am about to turn forty, and these friends have known me since I was sixteen. Our friendship is defined by perpetual movement—from America to Spain and back. And yet despite all the distance and the time traversed, I feel, on the cusp of forty, that I am aging in place and the world is shrinking around me.
When I was sixteen Spain felt like a place I could get lost in. Surely it was big enough—in its most remote and removed places—to harbor fugitives who sought protection from the ravages of time herself.If I were clever and cunning enough I could disappear into it.
Now, the city of Alicante, where I first stayed close to a quarter of a century ago, feels smaller. The discotheques and the beaches, the shops, have all shrunk. They’re slowly closing in on me every time I visit.
As I get older, the world shrinks. I learn that travel can’t displace time like it did before. No matter where you go, you see younger versions of yourself in others. All of them remind you of you.
Beautiful faces and bodies, unblemished by time, momentarily distract you, but then you return to this: they too will be forced to compromise and make trade offs; they too will weigh their hopes against their achievements; time will devour all of them, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
The shrinking world has other facets to it. In addition to somehow not feeling as far away from home as you did when you were when you were sixteen, you perceive the cultural differences as less and less consequential. Yes, there are sidewalk cafes in Europe; and yes, people there have a way of lingering over a beer or a coffee that would somehow seem like an obscene waste of time in America; but at the end of the day they still have bills to pay and food to put on the table, as well as the roof over their heads to shelter the food from rotting in the sun and the bills from getting lost in the mail.
The universe is supposedly expanding, but with every breath we take, the world shrinks.
