Comfort didn’t make you who you are. Friction did.
Everyone told me to say “Bonjour” when greeting people in France. Solid advice, except when I did that, they followed up by talking French at me very fast. So I scrapped it and led with “hello” instead — so they knew immediately I was American and only spoke English. And here’s what happened: their faces softened. They slowed down. They met me where I was.
That should have been my first clue about what kind of trip this was going to be.
I was standing in the middle of Charles de Gaulle Airport holding a red piece of paper and absolutely no idea what it meant. We’d packed for eleven days in France and Portugal into carry-ons. Vacuum sealed. Rolled tight. We were proud of ourselves. And then the man at the gate looked at our bags, weighed them, and handed us that red slip like a verdict. We were rejected. Too heavy. Get out of line. The problem was we didn’t know where to go. The announcements were in French. The signs were in French. Everyone around us seemed to know exactly what they were doing and we were just two Americans standing there, lost, holding our red paper like it was a scarlet letter.
And then a man walked up to us. Salt and pepper hair. Beard to match. He didn’t know us. We hadn’t asked for help. He just saw two people who looked lost — because we were — and he pointed us where we needed to go. That was it. He didn’t make us feel stupid. He didn’t sigh. He just helped.
I thought about my mother.
Her name was Vicki. She never left Illinois. Not to Florida, where her family had moved. Not anywhere, really. We offered to fly with her, to hold her hand through every step of it. She said no. Airports scared her. The unknown scared her. The idea that the rules might be different somewhere else, that she might not know what to do — that was enough to keep her home. She died without ever finding out that the world would have been kind to her. I don’t say that to be cruel. I say it because I believe it completely. I have now stood in airports in foreign countries, unable to read the signs, unable to understand the announcements, holding the wrong paper — and strangers helped me. Every time. Not because they had to. Because that’s mostly what people do when they see someone who needs it. Vicki never got to know that.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about people who never leave their comfort zone. It’s not laziness. It’s not even stubbornness, though it can look that way. It’s that they have never once been the foreigner. They have never been the person who doesn’t understand the rules, who can’t read the signs, who needs grace extended to them by a stranger. When you live your whole life inside a place where you know how everything works, you start to believe — without even meaning to — that your way is just the way. That your normal is everyone’s normal. And then you can’t understand why other people do things differently. Why they speak a different language. Why their customs seem strange. Because you’ve never stood in their airport holding the wrong paper.
Travel doesn’t automatically fix this. I want to be honest about that. I’ve met plenty of people who go abroad and come home more convinced than ever that America does it better. Tourism isn’t the cure. But friction might be. The bag weighing situation wasn’t comfortable. Neither was navigating a city where I didn’t speak the language, where I was the one who needed help, where I was — for the first time in a long time — the outsider. That experience doesn’t make you a better person automatically. But it does make it harder to believe you’re the center of the universe. Because you stood in the middle of it and you clearly were not.
France was kind to us. Portugal was kind to us. Kinder, honestly, than we maybe deserved, given that we showed up knowing only one word of their language and mispronouncing that. I kept thinking: they didn’t have to do this. They adjusted for us. They switched languages mid-sentence. They pointed. They slowed down. They helped. And I kept thinking about my mother. About what she missed. Not the Eiffel Tower — though it’s every bit as advertised, and I have no notes. Not the croissants or the romantic boat ride on the Seine. She missed finding out that a stranger with salt and pepper hair would see her looking lost and walk over and point her in the right direction. She missed finding out the world was safe enough.
I’m not telling you to book a flight. I’m telling you that my mother was afraid of everything and the world would have been so kind to her. If you’re someone who hasn’t left — whether that’s your city, your country, your comfort zone — I’m not judging you. I understand the pull of the familiar. I understand not wanting to hold the red piece of paper and not know where to go.
But I hope you go anyway. Because somewhere out there is a man with salt and pepper hair who will walk over and point you in the right direction. He’s not waiting for you to deserve it. He’s just waiting for you to show up.
Go be lost somewhere.
