My small planet, my small circles

Here we are, all packed (well, almost) and ready to leave this house for over two months. It is impossible to pack for this trip. I can easily imagine dozens of scenarios for which I would need different clothes, supplies and baby gear. We have decided to travel light. The only way I can see this working is that we shed our skins a few times - pack for the first week or two, then go op-shopping and donate the stuff that's no longer needed. This is exactly what has happened every time we stay on the road for months.

Today, we had one last playdate with the neighbours. I have to say I haven't really embraced playdates during my 2.5 year stint with motherhood. Organising gatherings just to watch the kids play seems like something housewives with unlimited time and resources would do. The only kind of playdates we have are the ones where I catch up (or talk business) with an old friend, who also happens to be a mother. Playgroups and other social circles, where the only common denominator is the age of your child tend to bore me to oblivion. I tried a local playgroup once and remember talking to a 50-year-old mother who (get this) had become pregnant accidentally whilst smoking lots of weed. But even exciting characters like that couldn't make me go back. It's just too much effort (also, to avoid judging other people's parenting, it is better to not witness it).

That's why it's so great to go to the neighbours. I takes one text to organise. It takes five seconds to get there. It's just another (much larger) piece of grass and another toddler to chase, but Lukas is over the moon. Today they brought out a bubble machine, that produced incredible bubble clusters.

Life should be that simple, lived in simple, small circles. That's where the magic happens, bubble magic included. Why can't we just all live on the same piece of land somewhere, all friends and family in neighbouring huts? That's the crazy thing: The world is huge, filled with Billions of people. Yet, if I got to keep those I know and care about and we were all safe on an island somewhere, would I really care about the rest? These days, we can have an audience of millions, but our capacity to deeply know and care about people is exactly the same it was at the dawn of time. We care about our tribe. Only today our tribe may be spread across continents, thousands of kilometres apart. How is this supposed to work?

Getting ready to travel again, I console myself with the thought of those who travelled before modern technology. In the 30+ hours it takes us to get from New Zealand to Finland, someone in leather sandals could have made it to the neighbouring village. That was the extend of their world, this is mine.