Far and away the hardest part of our pledge for me is giving up air travel. We’ll still take one trip per year. We aren’t giving up flying altogether because we think part of our responsibility raising kids in our current world is to show them other cultures so they know how similar we all are. So, we’ll go farther away and stay longer when we do travel. Right now, we’re going to Spain for a month in December. The following summer, we plan to be in Beijing for three months so the kids can improve their Chinese (both are, or will be, in an immersion preschool). After that, who knows? We’ve discussed a a year in Valpraiso, Chile.
And don’t get me wrong, those trips will be great. But, we always loved flying often, to see as many new places as possible.
In fact, it took me two days after our pledge to realize that it’d mean forgoing the trip we’d planned to Alaska next fall. I’ll turn 40 then, and it was what I wanted to do most to celebrate. I kept trying to rationalize the trip. We’d planned it before the pledge. I could take one more then stop. But, we’re already taking a long flight to Spain. And, what finally prevented me was the irony: I want to see the beauty of Alaska, including it’s fast-receding glaciers, but what the state most needs environmentally is for me–for all of us–to stay home.
Our plan is to go to the Olympic Peninsula instead, possibly en route to the San Juan islands. So, am I really giving up that much?
It was my mom who gave me that insatiable desire to experience new places. She passed away almost exactly five years ago, and I often wonder what she’d say about both the travel decision and our pledge more broadly. She’d have been upset that it meant fewer trips to see the grandkids (I can still sometimes hear her trying to talk me out of things in my head all these years later). Mom died two months before our son was born. Her battle with cancer lasted more than a decade. She’d been doing so well, then slipped away so fast. At the end, mom wasn’t even able to make a voice recording of her reading Goodnight Moon because she was too weak.
Because of how and when we lost her, I feel an especially strong responsibility to honor her memory, and raise the kids in a way she would’ve supported. I think we are, but I can’t be sure. I could really use her advice right now. Living in a world on the brink somehow feels even less certain and more lonely without her here.