A Beginner’s Thoughts on Mobility
 
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If you can’t go where you want to go, when you want to go there (Miguel Cortez)

If you can’t go where you want to go, when you want to go there it is because you are mobility-impaired.  Your mobility might be impaired because you are not the 1% of the world’s population who can afford airfare.  Your mobility might be impaired because you don’t speak the local languages.  Your mobility might be impaired because your child, your job needs you here, right now.  These impairments might be both limiting and full of possibility and joy.      

Some years ago you might have moved with your new spouse from Mexico to the United States.   You may or may not have applied for unobtainable visas.  But nevertheless, you moved.  You were not excused the sense of fear and possibility that all brave pioneers must feel.  In the process of making your family, you drove back to Mexico each time one of your two daughters was born, because, rumor had it, American hospitals confiscate Mexican babies.  And oh how these daughters grew be the smartest, loveliest people alive.
More recently, you might have been driving to this home you created in America after completing your duties at a residence for old folks who need care and the occasional piano melody, when the universal sound of a police’s siren did, in fact, signal an odyssean change in your life’s course.              
And with this change your complicated relationship to travel might grow ever complicated and tenuous—so that on your first airplane ride to a country you had hoped to never see again you might ride in the first class section.  Your icecream sunday might be very delicious.  The clouds might be so beautiful outside your porthole window.  Your mother and father might surprise you by crying so hard when they see you for the first time in sixteen years.  But how, oh how, could your ticket not be round-trip?          

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If you can’t move from your prison cell (Herman Joshua Wallace, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

If you can’t move from your prison cell you are imprisoned, and not in the way we use imprisonment as a metaphor.  You are imprisoned for something you did or did not do.  You are imprisoned in relation to an agreement, to a law. And your imprisonment evidences the disparity between lawfulness and justice.               
In this jail or this prison—maximum security or minimal—you are given time and you are given rage.  You might use both to build a library.  You might write letters, you might draw images, you might make music—in this confinement you might be infinitely and unromantically creative.  Your confinement might galvanize millions of unimprisoned people.  You might realize that it’s not by ornithological accident or field study happenstance that one gains understanding of the relationship between caged birds and song.    

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If you can’t move your body (Martha Mason)

If you can’t move your body due to a childhood illness or event, you might think about shaking your fist at the heavens and cursing your cursed existence.  What, after all, are our bodies for if not for moving?               
You might look forward to when your mind allows you sleep.  And in between episodes of sleep you might be severely depressed because your life seems pointlessly and hopelessly defined by the narrow perimeter of your bed’s mattress.  You might consider the ways your closest confidants could assist you in making your own death.  You might, simultaneously, discover reading as a better form of sleep.  Someone might give you Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and you might read it many many times.  You might, in fact, write a book of your own, trusting your experience and voice.  In addition to publishing this book you might enroll in correspondence courses at a nearby college; you might continue on to receive a graduate degree, graduating first in your class.  An artistic movement called performance art might resonate with you because we are all, in a way, performing authentically and absurdly.  You might begin to understand your physical stillness as proof of endurance—like monks in religious devotion or artists sitting silently, inexplicably in galleries and museums.
And you might be the most social of your friends—the default party planner and dinner host.  You might ask that, after long nighttime get-togethers, the wine bottles be hidden from the curbside pickup, lest the neighbors think you indulgent and a lush.         

When your mother ages as mothers do (upending the world and requiring care by another), you are the one to arrange this care for her.  You execute her last wishes.  You, in fact, do all of these most difficult things, finding yourself ever-curious about others’ professional and recreational surprise that you live such a capable, full, and fulfilling life.  But what else were you going to do: just lie there?

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Mobility is about so much more than walking, isn’t it

Mobility is about so much more than walking, isn’t it, when we think about definitions of an upwardly mobile class, the mobile phone vs. corded landline, and the kinetic mobile sculpture made famous by Alexander Calder.  Mobility is about the far reaches of fiction and history and stories, about our ability to feel the entire spectrum of our existences, and to be moved by them.