Sometimes it’s the glances that remain with us. Glances that barely hold the eye, but are enough to tell the tale.

I’ve been recalling the recent three weeks of intense travel during my last stint as a Smithsonian speaker. I confess that this voyage overwhelmed me. We started in Singapore and sailed to ports in Kuala Lumpur and Penang (Malaysia), Phuket (Thailand), Yangon (Myanmar/Burma), Cochin, Goa, Mangalore, and Mumbai (India), Muscat (Oman), and finally Fujairah, Abu-Dhabi, and Dubai (United Arab Emirates). Suffice it to say that I never expected to be any of the places I just listed. Ever.

So what does one retain from such travel? Well, first, a voyage like this can be a metaphor for life itself. Don’t we, at a certain point, look back and see how life took us to “ports“ we never expected to visit. We find ourselves thinking, “Did these things really happened?” “Was I really there in that situation?”

We do travel through life, whether or not we leave home. When I was a kid, travel didn’t exist as an option. Only people in books traveled. Maybe that’s why it became such a goal for me: a door opening to the world that surely existed beyond my backyard in Roanoke, Virginia. At least it existed for characters in books. And it seemed so effortless.

Well, I’ve traveled a lot now. I look back particularly at the six years since I began to work for The Smithsonian as a speaker and Study Leader. These travels have been an overwhelming blessing. Each trip solves a piece of the puzzle, yielding valuable information. And each trip provides resources essential to our mission here at Professor Carol.

But travel is not effortless. It can be disorienting and exhausting, despite the unfathomable luxuries of the modern world. Plus, it’s hard (for me at least) to put any tour on the shelf afterwards and move forward to the next one (and the next one begins this Thursday!). I remain gripped by the colors, the sounds, the scents, even the motion of the roads (in this case, pretty bumpy!). I keep “seeing” the faces of guests on the ship who attended my lectures and became travel buddies.

One remembers particularly the guides during the excursions. Each presented a different ethnicity, religion, and world view. Some were stiff and scripted. But others were dynamic, committed to their towns or countries to the point that you hated to depart their company. And then there was that one beautiful gal in Goa who startled us by pouring a ladle of cold water laced with Lemongrass oil down our backs after the sweltering tour of the spice plantation!

But still, even with all of those impressions, travel comes down to glances. Glances from a toddler wedged in a doorway, scribbling with a stick in the dust. Glances from the dark eyes of a tiny girl peddling bracelets as she trailed our group through the fish market. The despairing glance of a gnarled old man lying on a stone slab in the dank laundry complex of Dhobi-ghat. Or the shining glance from the fresh-faced fellow who brought us cheeseburgers at the Johnny-Rocket in Dubai as he shyly told us he was about to go work on a cruise ship and see the world.

The world is too big to fathom. Billions of hopes and dreams clash with the realities of poverty and tribulation. How do we understand it? How do we capture it? The guidebooks and history books help us. But the true substance of it comes down to glances. Glances that stay with us, long after the calendar has moved us forward.