The Frequency That Found Her
COLLISION 00012
The more I’ve adopted traveling with intent and perhaps more importantly, the more I’ve let go of an identity that no longer served me, the more I’ve felt a heightened and fulfilling shift in my interactions with others when I travel. It is as if I’m tuned in, finally after forty-seven years on this planet, into a whole new frequency.
Over the last eighteen months of untethered travel, I haven’t felt the shift as prominently as I had until I visited Mexico City for a week in May. I must have presented there with a shinier approachability which makes sense as I had already acknowledged I was traveling as leaned in as I may have ever been. I was hungry for whatever movement brought – be it creativity, culture shock or the collisions I’d come to live for.
I would go on to have encounters with a couple from Phoenix at the Handshake Speakeasy, two sisters from Austin at Pujol, and a young man from Chicago at Quintonil’s chef’s counter.
In each instance, shared wonder and awe for a dish sparked a back and forth which deepened as the drinks and meals progressed. In each instance, my original calculation about who my fellow travelers were proved to be embarrassingly narrow. In each instance, by staying open to coincidence, I had found a tiny irreplaceable burst of reassurance and joy.
By collecting and reflecting on these encounters through a single lens, their randomness had accumulated just so. I could suddenly grasp the power of culminating collisions as readily as I have come to celebrate the easy-to-spot, single seismic ones.
But of course, I reminded myself. Travel is a journey – not a series of disconnected episodes. It only makes sense that not all collisions will stand meaningfully on their own.
Then, somewhat reluctantly, I thought back to all the times I had sat in seats around the world completely walled off and resistant. Completely missing the point of travel – shielding myself in effect from its transformative touch and power. By refusing to let hundreds of opportunities to learn, stretch and feel pass through me, I had given up so much. Where, who, would I be now if I had embraced the gifts of travel as they were laid down before me?
Instead I chose to focus on what culminating collisions in Mexico City were surfacing to teach me. The couple at the bar? They weren’t snobby socialite hipsters. The sisters at Pujol? They were in town for two-Michelin-star dining and a System of a Down heavy metal concert! The young fellow Chicagoan? A soulful consultant who was learning to sew.
And me? Who was I to this gloriously random group of foodies?
A stepping stone, I had hoped, to the next random foodie. A reminder like they had been for me, to turn over our first impressions and not cling to them.
The girl who used to sit stiff and unaffected? She was a wiser woman now, making up for lost time, finally grateful for the frequency that found her.
