It’s Not Possible to Be Everywhere

But there’s gold in missing out.

As I write this Medium piece, the men’s World Cup soccer match between Wales and Iran is on in the next room, unheard and unseen.

Missing a live soccer match makes this writing experience more valuable — the gold in missing out.

We’ve been everywhere but…

I love Johnny Cash but yesterday he taunted me with his version of the song I’ve Been Everywhere, with these lines:

I’ve been everywhere, man

I’ve been everywhere, man

Crossed the deserts’ bare, man

I’ve breathed the mountain air, man

Of travel I’ve had my share, man

In the map of Romania in the photo, that now refolds on command, you can see the dark-coloured Carpathian Mountains that form Romania’s spine. During our four months in this southern European country last fall, we breathed the Carpathian air many times.

Though Romania does not have a desert, it does have a plain that made it vulnerable to invasions by the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg, Austria-Hungary, German and Soviet Empires. We crossed that flatland many a time, by car, plane and train.

In Everywhere, Cash chronicles the North American cities and states he visited. I counted 90.

We’ve been to: Timișoara, Reșita, Arad, Brad, Roșia Montană, Albă Iulia, Cluj-Napoca, Turda, Sibiu, Sighișoara, Gherla, Sighetu Marmatiei, Săpânța, Suceava, Brașov, and Bucharest. That’s a manageable 19.

But we missed Iași on the Moldova border and Constanta on the Black Sea and Tâgovișta, a few miles northeast of Bucharest where Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were executed after the Romanian Revolution in 1989.

Romania has over 200 cities and towns.

We missed most.

Timișoara, our Romanian home city, will be a European Capital of Culture in 2023. The Romanian Revolution of 1989 began in this western city. It’s known as the green city for its 36 parks and green spaces. And its city center includes five squares including Victory Square at Christmas time pictured below.

We walked everywhere every day and particularly loved strolling along the Bega Canal bordered by many parks. But we never discovered Alpinet, pictured below.

Our apartment was in Timișoara’s Elisabetin neighborhood. Two blocks from our front door, tucked behind the Church of St. Mary Queen of Peace, a Greek Catholic Church, is the Museum of the Communist Consumer. This museum is one of the city’s top tourist destinations. We walked by it every day and could see what looked like a funky outdoor bar and patio. Its hours were unpredictable.

So we missed its treasures.

The gold in missing out

I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. Burkeman offered a useful way to think about missing out. He calculated human civilization has been around for 310,000 weeks and today the average person lives around 4000. I’m at 3804.

And was oblivious to everything that happened during the 306,196 weeks before I was born. My father died in 1993. What would he think of the World Wide Web, cell phones and Donald Trump. He’s missed so much. So will I.

Burkeman’s fine book reminds me my existence is finite, with a beginning and an end. And all I’m guaranteed to miss during the precious weeks I’ve been given. He is first merciless and then merciful.

Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many that you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experience you actually do have time for — and the freer you are to choose, in each moment what counts the most.

Missing out on almost everything is inevitable. As I write this sentence, I’m aware I’ve chosen this experience over the Iran vs. Wales match.

Last January, my last month in Romania, I had a free day and chose a trip to Roșia Montană and Albă Iulia over a visit to the Serbian city Novi Sad. It was a difficult decision.

Novi Sad is a European Capital of Culture in 2022. Earlier last fall, Rebecca and I decided to spend four days in Budapest, Hungary instead of Novi Sad and Belgrade. We had time for one outside Romania trip and we chose Hungary over Serbia.

Albă Iulia is honored as the site where Romania’s historical provinces were united by treaty, in 1918. December 1, the Great Union Day, is Romania’s Thanksgiving.

The gold mine is a World Heritage site with 63 miles of tunnels.

I steadied my hands to take this picture inside one of the tunnels. Closed-in spaces frighten me. Guide Dorin Rus said to give in to the experience. To not fight it.

That’s also a valuable way to think about what we miss. The walkway represents my life. The path behind, before me, is absent. The path ahead, my life, bends toward a light, and then nothing.

The walls and ceiling express the constraints of our choices.

The chiseled veins embody what we choose to experience.

And what we’ve given up.

Iran vs. Wales, 0 — 0