Belonging to Places We’ll Never See

There are approximately 195 countries in the world, and I will see maybe five of them before I die.

This calculation sits in my mind like a stone. If I’m lucky, if health and money and circumstance align perfectly, if I live another forty years and manage one international trip every eight years, I might glimpse a dozen new places. The Amazon rainforest will remain a documentary on someone else’s television. The Northern Lights will stay trapped in other people’s photographs. The temples of Kyoto will exist only in my imagination.

The mathematics are merciless: there are roughly 7,000 languages being spoken right now, and I will never hear 6,995 of them. There are mountains I’ll never climb, oceans I’ll never see, deserts I’ll never cross. Most of the world’s beauty will happen without me witnessing it.

This should be devastating, but instead it’s strangely liberating.

Last week, Arash was studying world geography, pointing to countries on his atlas and asking which ones I’ve visited. “Only three, Baba?” he said, disappointed, as if my limited passport stamps somehow diminished the vastness of what we were looking at together. But I realized something while we traced coastlines with our fingers: the miracle isn’t how much of the world I haven’t seen. The miracle is that the world exists at all.

Somewhere right now, the sun is setting over the Sahara in colors I can’t imagine. Someone is watching their first snowfall in Siberia. A child in Peru is learning to weave patterns their grandmother’s grandmother knew by heart. All of this is happening simultaneously, this moment, while I sit in our small apartment in Dhaka, and somehow knowing it’s happening is almost as profound as being there.

The sadness of limited experience transforms into gratitude for the existence of unlimited beauty. I will never see the cherry blossoms in Japan, but cherry blossoms are blooming in Japan. I will never hear whale songs in the Arctic, but whales are singing in the Arctic. The world is more magnificent than any single consciousness could contain, and that’s what makes it magnificent.

I think about my mother, who never left Bangladesh but could describe the English countryside with startling precision because she’d read so many novels set in Yorkshire moors. Her imagination was more traveled than most people’s bodies. She taught me that the capacity to be moved by distant beauty—even unseen beauty—is itself a form of witnessing.

Happy sometimes mentions places she dreams of visiting—the lavender fields of France, the markets of Morocco, the Northern Lights dancing over Iceland. When she describes these places, her face takes on this particular expression of longing that’s also contentment. She’s not frustrated by the impossibility of seeing everything. She’s grateful for the existence of everything to see.

Maybe the real tragedy isn’t our geographical limitations but our imaginative limitations. Maybe the sadness comes not from being unable to visit every place but from being unable to fully appreciate any place. How many sunsets in our own city have I ignored while dreaming of sunsets in Santorini?

The world is vast and I am small and I will die having seen only the tiniest fraction of what deserves to be seen. But I will also die having been part of the same cosmos that contains all these unseen wonders. The same physics that govern the aurora borealis govern the blood moving through my veins. The same stardust that forms mountain ranges forms the synapses firing in my brain as I imagine mountain ranges.

I am connected to every place I’ll never visit by the simple fact of being made of the same elements, governed by the same laws, participating in the same unfathomable experiment of existence.

The mathematics of impossible become the mathematics of belonging: I don’t need to see everything to be part of everything.