The Trouble with "Near" and "Far"

My favourite character from Sesame Street is Grover. I don’t know if it’s his gangly blue frame or his grovelly voice or just some of the fun and funky things he says and does but he’s my fave – although Bert is a close second and Elmo just ruined everything. Maybe Grover’s best skit is his very simple demonstration of near and far. In it, he runs up to the camera saying “This is near” and then turns and runs into the distance turning to the camera saying “And this is far” and then repeats the whole thing. I love it for its simplicity and Grover’s manic, earnest and ever-tiring need to get us all to physically understand the difference and the distance between the two.

Why do I bring up Grover? Well, recently Linton and I have noticed a strange sort of disconnect between our own lives here (near) and the lives of those living back home (far). One of the things that I think is going on is that – at least from this highly egocentric point of view – when you embark on a major life adventure such as ours, you tend to think that by the very virtue of its uniqueness, you will remain top-of-mind for people back home. In point of fact, I think the opposite occurs. While we think our news, dates and travels are of the utmost importance, we forget that to everyone else back home, who have busy lives with their own news, dates and travels, we are in fact – by virtue of some sort of abstract distance-time-continuum – people without portfolio. There is quite simply something about being “far” away that makes one less real or relevant than when “near”.

We were talking about this over coffee the other day while we reflected on the fact that many people we have told about our return dates have, a few weeks later, asked two or three more times about our return dates! We laughed that maybe it was just us – the slackers with all the time on our hands being able to worry about mundane things like return dates, buying shoelaces or a second cousin’s birthday. Or maybe Lint’s super-planner genes were infecting us both and while we knew what we would be doing on the third Tuesday in July, we were surprised to hear that others back home did not. Or maybe, quite simply, our emails aren’t quite as gripping a read as we thought.

Whatever the reason, and it’s really not all that important, we’ve noticed that for some people despite the explosion and complete immersion of the digital age – with Skype and all its buddies – some people still seem only able to connect with another person when that person is standing in the same room (or in the case of Grover – “Near”). Otherwise, the few thousand kilometers and several days of travel time create a barrier between the person and the reality of the life living far away that prevents events, dates, and experiences from actually existing in the present. In some ways as Linton has said, it’s almost as if some people are saying “I won’t bother connecting ‘til their back because, who knows they may choose to stay! When they’re back and officially within touch of my own reality, then I will re-connect."

This is no rant. Without a doubt we are guilty of the same sort of priority-by-proximity thinking and I’m sure it sounds like my insecurities are getting the better of me, but I still think there is something about distance that changes relationship and which technology cannot yet capture or provide for some people. Certainly, the virtual hug of Skype and the primitive phone call with a clear connection and no delay are wonders of the modern world, but what still can’t be removed is all that space or "far-ness" in Grover parlance. What it ultimately means is that we are all as significant to the day-to-day reality of a distant loved one as the weather in Siberia or a civil war in Turkmenistan because, like an infinite number of other things going on around the world that we have no hope in having any effect on (thankfully in many cases) - the lives of the far away "Grovers" are completely out of touch of our hands.

This might also sound a lot like sour grapes. After all, didn’t we pick up stakes and move down under to try on a new life – with new friends, experiences, etc? Why then would we be so concerned about the prospect of not being "on the radar" back home? Well, I’m not. I don’t think. I just think it’s interesting that distance seems to create a void or a barrier or a delay between people that I don’t think exists to the same degree when you live just around the corner…

Maybe Grover had it right all along. Near and far are very different and they take some effort to bridge. When you’re near and in another person’s tv screen or face you are by default in their life, too; whereas, when you’re “far” it’s very hard to reach out and connect with people because there’s a tonne of space and a few billion other people in between. We are just now beginning our own run back to "near", and that impending reality is leaving us, like Grover, breathless.