I mentioned in a previous post that I was "bookending" the pandemic with Japan trips. I have always worked long hours, and have missed a lot of time with my children as they've been growing up. But when they each turned 12, I promised to make it up to each of them with a Dad/Kid trip anywhere in the world. They both chose Japan. My daughter's trip was 5 months before the pandemic closed Japanese borders to tourism, and my son's is now, just 6 weeks after the borders reopened.
I understand the level of privilege that that gift requires, and I feel so lucky to be able to give it.
The power of the perspective gained, not just about other cultures, but your own, is
liberating. The understanding that the world is bigger than your neighborhood, bigger than your country, expands your understanding of who you are, and how you relate to the world. Too often, the concerns of family and community can grow to be overwhelming without the benefit of perspective. One of the many gifts of travel is the understanding that you are both smaller and more connected than you thought.
As a clinician who has worked my whole career with multi-stressed individuals, families, and systems, I have never done anything more effective in changing lives than the Japan Trip program I ran for 12 years at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston. Many of the youth I worked with had far more than their share of challenges and problems. Sometimes heartbreaking, often heroic stories of struggle and survival. I've never seen that it is helpful to "fix the problems." When children have too many adults in their life trying to figure out what the problem is and fix it, the problem becomes the focus, and too often, the child becomes defined by the problem list. Rather than fixing problems, programs which focus on building capacity are the ones that change lives. In short, rather than "fix what's wrong," you need to "feed what's right." The bigger the problems, the more capacity you need to build.
I've seen this program turn D students into A students, give hope, create philanthropists, heal loss, focus goals, end cycles of poverty, and help struggling kids find reasons to keep fighting. We served youth who had literally never once left the triangle formed by their school, apartment, and Boys and Girls Club since the day they came home from the hospital. They had never been downtown, never been outside of Boston - and didn't think they could. This program shattered the boundaries of their world - their experience transitioned from one that was confined both economically and spatially to a more expansive world - a recognition that those boundaries that seemed impenetrable no longer constrained them. I was lucky enough to stay involved with those kids long enough to see that those boundaries never returned.
I think every child should be able to have the benefit of travel. One of the "costs" of the pandemic has been a shrinking of our boundaries - a limitation on how far the edges of our world can expand. It's time to re-expand, to breathe in our wider world, and let the "oxygen" of travel feed our possibilities again.
Comments