A reflection on the gold in missing out

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

We’ve been everywhere

Five days ago this refrain from Johnny Cash’s I’ve Been Everywhere taunted me during my plane’s 30 minute descent into the Kansas City International Airport. My travel day had started 24 hours earlier in Timișoara, Romania and included stops in Frankfurt and Washington DC. I used up some of those tedious airport hours inspecting our well-creased Romanian map.

If you look closely at our map pictured on the right, you can see the dark colored Carpathian Mountains that form Romania’s spine. During our 4 months in Romania, Rebecca and I had breathed the Carpathian air many times. And 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.* Rebecca and I crossed that plain many a time, either by auto, plane or train.

We’d been to Timisoara, Resita, Arad, Brad, Abrud, Roșia Montană, Alba Iulia, Cluj-Napoca, Turda, Sibiu, Sighișoara, Gherla, Sighetu Marmatiei, Săpanta, Suceava, Brashov, Bran, Reșita, and Bucharest. We’d had our share, folks! However, during the 3 hour DC layover, I began to list where we had not been. By the time we started our descent into Kansas City, Johnny’s refrain had become not a joyful recognition of the places we had been but a taunt, a fear about all we had missed.

But not really everywhere

We spent quality time in 19 Romanian cities but we did not visit Iași in the east on the Moldova border or Constanta on the Black Sea or Târgoviște, a few miles northeast of Bucharest where Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were executed after Romania’s 1989 Revolution. Romania has over 200 cities and towns with populations larger than either Clarinda or Decorah, Iowa where we live. We had been to many but not most of its cities or towns.

Our Romanian home city of Timișoara will be the European Capital of Culture in 2023. The Romanian Revolution of 1989 began here, its City Center includes five beautiful squares, and, my favorite reason, Timișoara’s 36 parks and green spaces. We walked everywhere every day and particularly loved walking along the Bega Canal bordered by many parks. But we never discovered Alpinet Park, pictured below.

Our apartment was in the Elisabetin neighborhood in Timișoara, on Strada Gheorghe Doja. 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. The picture below shows its basement room. The floor above includes a funky bar with an outdoor patio. That’s what friends told us and on our daily walks we could see part of the patio from the sidewalk. While it was often closed, we never went inside. Nor did we ever wander into the church.

The gold in missing out

I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. He calculates that human civilization has been around for 310,000 weeks and today the average person lives about 4000. I am at 3764. I was oblivious to all that happened during the 306,236 weeks before I was born and will miss everything after my death. Burkeman’s book reminds me that my existence is finite. I had a beginning and I will have an end.

4000 measly weeks of life seems so unfair. And what about what I will miss during the precious weeks I have? Burkeman is merciless and 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 you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for–and the freer you are to choose, in each moment what counts the most.

From Four Thousand Weeks, p. 50

Missing out on almost everything is inevitable, outside and inside my existence. I took the picture on the right a couple of weeks ago on my last day trip from Timișoara. I had a free day and choose a gold mine over a visit to Novi Sad just across Romania’s border with Serbia. Rebecca missed this visit to the Roșia Montană gold mine because her 90 day visa was up. This ancient Roman gold mine is now a World Heritage Site and included 63 miles of tunnels. Burkeman writes about how the limits of our lives can seem claustrophobic, like this tunnel.

I have always hated to be in closed-in spaces. Before we entered the the mine, Dorin Rus, our guide, said to give-in to the experience. To not fight it.

That’s also good advice for all that we will miss before, after, and during the precious weeks we are given.

Look again at the tunnel. The walkway represents our lives, with their beginnings and endings. The walls and ceiling express the constraints on our choices. The chiseled veins embody what we choose to experience. Those choices are like gold.

When I look closely, I see the 19 cities we traveled to in Romania, the parks we walked through in Timișoara, and Profi’s, our favorite neighborhood convenience store.