When I board a plane and then watch it slide through the clouds as it takes me somewhere else, I’m always in the exciting state of being between two places. But when I went to Panama in August, I was in between more than land and sky.
I was in month four of unemployment, waiting for a man to call me back. Never had I ever, even in my dating days, waited so anxiously for a man to call me back.
I was unencumbered and unscheduled, so it was a good time to take a trip. I was on the cusp of a substantial life change, so it was a strange time to take a trip. But the trip was booked long before the job was lost, and I still had a wild and precious life to live. I had a birthday girl (age neutral) to celebrate.
And celebrate we would, after I pushed thoughts of a job offer to the back of my mind, shoved my phone into the bottom of my bag, and found comfort in distracting myself with the details around me.
I tried to live in the moments as they unfolded on night one: Playing the hook and ring game for the first time in a crowded bar filled with millennial tourists and our guides, singing the R&B songs of our youth at the top of our lungs.
I pushed away the nagging feeling that I should be applying for more jobs and turned my focus to a new mission: making sure the birthday girl heard her favorite 2010s club banger. In my “good feelings” memory repository, I added: Skipping carefree through the unfamiliar cobblestone streets. The screams we and the other tourists from Atlanta let out when the song came on. The confetti on the floor after we’d finally heard it.
In Panama, I found myself in a liminal space, suspended between my unstructured job-searching days and my eventual return to work and routine. The vibrant streets of Panama City, with their striking neoclassical architecture and colorful arched doors, conspired to make me forget the phone call I was waiting for. It felt insignificant (at least for the time being) as I walked through a centuries-old plaza.
On day three, we boarded a small cruise ship for a tour of the legendary Panama Canal. As I climbed back and forth from one deck to the other, I tested the limits of my motion sickness patches. Three hours in, as their miraculous effects started to wear off a little, I googled, “motion sickness cruise remedies.” A few people said to pick a place to stand and then just stare at the horizon.
And so I stared—at the back of the guy in the green hat’s head, at the knot in the big mooring ball rope on the ship, at the wide expanse of waterway and the gigantic ships passing through ahead of ours.
There was a small black dot out in the distance. I gazed directly at it, trying not to be sick, and it helped a little. The dot got smaller and smaller as our ship moved onward. That’s how the phone call was beginning to feel, too.
I started putting my phone away more often, especially at restaurants. It felt cheesy, glancing around to see what I could notice. I was taking in the tiniest details of my environment and taking note of every flavor in every dish, banking these memories as if I’d never be this free again.
No matter what happened with the phone call, something would change when I returned home. But I tried to choose delight instead, noticing how much the chefs in Panama loved edible flowers on everything and tiger nuts in everything.
Between bites of slow-simmered beef in caramel sauce and curry, and fresh fish that was clearly cooked over an open flame, I took my time at dinner. I dipped into every bottle of hot sauce on the table, using one made with their native aji chombo peppers to top a tender oxtail stew.
I spotted a couple sitting knees-to-knees (and almost nose-to-nose) at the corner of a table, sharing a bottle of wine. The woman poured the rest of her wine in the man’s glass, reminding me of my husband back home who will finish the food I can’t at restaurants. My “cleanup crew,” as I call him.
Not to be dramatic, but paying attention felt like a radical act. I knew I would one day sell my time and talents to power a capitalist society again, but today was not that day. So I forced myself to pause and appreciate the ambiguous territory I was living in and push away the anxious thoughts forming in the corner of my mind: When will this man call me about this job? How much of my identity and day-to-day life is about to change? Will this be my last glimpse of travel for a while?
On the last day of the trip, the phone call came. Sort of. Ten minutes before our bright green classic convertible was scheduled to arrive for one final tour, I saw an email from the man I expected to call me. It was a “no.” I didn’t get the job. I felt the blow of rejection for about twenty minutes, and every minute after, I mostly felt relief.
I would get a “yes” two weeks later. A better one, the type of “yes” I hadn’t known I needed when I was fixated on the other HR man calling to put me out of my job search misery.
But for my last day in Panama, I needed to notice every color in every corner, the contrast of a doorway painted bright canary yellow and deep emerald green. I needed to see one more smile from Wilson, the bellhop with the brightest energy morning, noon, and night.
I needed to hear the older Black man on the street shout “Black don’t crack!” to my friend and me as we rode around the historic quarter one last time in that ridiculous green tourist car. I needed that moment of us throwing back our heads and laughing.
I knew it was a privilege that I was able to take the trip at all. One person’s temporary problems, like the ones I brought with me, are trivial in the global scheme of things and even in the full story of my life.
I’m not invalidating the anxiety I felt, but putting it into perspective. As I learned more about Panama’s tragic history, I also saw the other side of the coin: the country’s beautiful indigenous roots and rich cultural heritage that formed despite the horrors its people experienced. The immense losses and inequality they’ve faced are an important part of their story, but it’s still only one part.
I didn’t know what life would look like when I crossed back over into my home country, my real life. This may be my last trip for a while. My “work from anywhere” days may be over. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe I’ll only go where PTO can take me—I’ll be forced to pay attention.