{"id":190,"date":"2017-10-20T16:41:48","date_gmt":"2017-10-20T16:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/?p=190"},"modified":"2018-03-16T12:45:49","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T12:45:49","slug":"see-soon-j-a-story-about-goodbyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/2017\/10\/20\/see-soon-j-a-story-about-goodbyes\/","title":{"rendered":"See you soon “J”!"},"content":{"rendered":"

A story about goodbyes<\/em><\/h2>\n

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When you live abroad, far from your parents and your childhood friends, you gradually learn how to leave behind someone dear. When you become an expat and people are coming and going in and out of your life, saying \u201cfarewell\u201d becomes a constant. In time, a permanent feeling of longing \u00a0for someone becomes part of you and, because of it, you come to acknowledge any emotions gravitating towards leave-taking situations.<\/p>\n

Or you may suppress your sentimental side, like I do, and choose to approach \u201cgoodbyes\u201d in a very formal, rather awkward manner. One may perceive my attitude as an acquired skill, very much linked to self-reliance, when in fact the big majority would agree that it\u2019s a coping mechanism, meant to hide my fear of losing human connectivity.<\/p>\n

Being a global citizen, certainly, has its own downsides and one of them is precisely the impermanence of our social connectivity. There is always distance between us and the loved ones and we need to put an effort to feel part of a community, or to create a sense of \u201ctogetherness\u201d. But our struggle teaches us awareness and helps us to consciously tune ourselves up to this particular type of existence. We embrace distances and we end up living with a luggage waiting for us to travel to the next place we call \u201chome\u201d.\u00a0 Maybe we don\u2019t enjoy \u201cgoodbyes\u201d, but we live for reunions, for the next \u201chello\u201d, the one that bring us closer and reconnects us.<\/p>\n

We create a new narrative. One that comforts us and\u00a0 shows us that this corner of the world resonates to any other, that we are not alone and somewhere, almost everywhere, there is someone else that doesn\u2019t believe in goodbyes or distances, but is always ready to travel for us, or to let us know that his home is ours.<\/p>\n

My post\u00a0 is, nevertheless, about teaching about \u201cgoodbyes\u201d and \u201cdistances\u201d young humans, toddlers, the very vulnerable global citizens, those who do not have any meaning of time and distance yet.\u00a0 They need, however, to travel in order to meet their grandparents and cousins, sometimes to different countries. They have airplanes as their favorite toys and they learn \u201csky\u201d among their first words. How do we teach them about \u201cgoodbyes\u201d? How do we teach them to accept distance and not to miss the grandmother that they have just accepted in their lives, the one that they are going to meet again only in a few months? \u00a0How do we explain to them, in simple words, that Internet is their path to human interconnection and also their surrogate for human touch, for the face to face playtime. How do we teach them to transcend borders and have a sense of community against all the odds, which are \u201cflourishing\u201d in our current state of the world?<\/p>\n

I do not have any answers yet.\u00a0 I do have though a 19-months-old little girl, who asks me every day about my parents, her “Lala” and “Tati”,\u00a0 the ones that I effortlessly left behind;\u00a0 the ones to whom I say \u201cgoodbye\u201d with a pat on their shoulders, doing this not because I\u2019m unsympathetic,\u00a0 but because I willfully choose not to look them in the eyes and sense their tears.\u00a0\u201cWe will see them soon\u201d, I often answer while a river of emotions bubbles up to my chest and makes me realize the pain I\u2019m carrying around.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou will see him soon\u201d I also tell her every time she asks about her first best friend \u201cJ\u201d,\u00a0 the one that moved back home, right after they finally accepted to share more hugs than slaps.<\/p>\n

Now she learned the word \u201csoon\u201d, and her \u201csoon\u201d, pronounced with a mountain of expectations, humbles me and reminds me that we are still not there yet. We haven\u2019t transcended pain, or space, or borders.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A story about goodbyes     When you live abroad, far from your parents and your childhood friends, you gradually learn how to leave behind someone dear. When you become an expat and people are coming and going in and out of your life, saying \u201cfarewell\u201d becomes a constant. In time, a permanent feeling of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[25,30,33,28,29,31,27,36,35,32,34],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-community","tag-connectivity","tag-distance","tag-expat","tag-farewell","tag-global-citizen","tag-goodbyes","tag-home","tag-reunions","tag-togetherness","tag-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/WhatsApp-Image-2017-10-16-at-18.32.28-e1508516154237.jpeg?fit=1200%2C900&ssl=1","views":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p92Eyv-34","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":263,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions\/263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}