Borders and Borderlessness
Recently we saw this incredible art exhibit in Tokyo called teamLabs:borderless. It was a digital art experience in which the paintings moved off the walls, interacted with people, and shifted from one room to another. It was exquisite and joyful and destructive and super immersive.
As we relocate country to country with our US passport, I am struck thinking about borders in our geopolitical real world. I use my American passport, my American dollars, and my American credit card that is so powerful in the countries we’re visiting. As a result, I get to experience a world that is largely borderless to me. What a privilege that is.
In Mexico, American travelers enter freely and lately more and more stay for long periods of time thanks to remote work and the lure of our digital nomad life. And at the border between Mexico and the US you see a desperate emergency for families desperate to cross a border that isn’t open to them. A closed border for them, and a very permeable border for me.
In Ecuador, the family I have known for 20 years just watched their oldest daughter graduate from college, first in her family to do so. But the fight that we went through to try to get her and her brother a temporary visa to study English in NY and live with us for a semester was a total fail. We can only assume that the consulate was calculating the risk of overstaying that temporary visa, which was enough to deny somebody an education. Stefi studied tourism in Ecuador and how powerful it could have been for her to speak English with greater fluency, thanks to a semester abroad. But the border is designed to keep her out.
And now the most surprising one is Japan. The border here is financial. Our dollar is so strong compared to the yen at this moment that I’ve met multiple people who would love to travel and visit New York or other destinations around the world, but the exchange rates leave them without the means to make that a possibility.
There are burning examples of border crises around the world — millions of refugees risking their lives to flee danger, millions more seeking economic stability. I won't wade too far into global geopolitics here; there have been debates about borders since the first human civilizations. But I believe we'd have a stronger, richer, safer and more connected global society if we extended care, welcome, and collaboration to our fellow humans, regardless of imaginary lines on a map.
One last example as we have been learning about the history of Japan in greater depth: in the Meiji period, Japan opened its borders for the first time in centuries. Emperor Meiji’s approach was to learn from the rest of the world — be it railways or whiskey — and then ground the innovations in Japanese culture. He urged his people to learn from other nations but to turn what was learned into the absolute best version it could be.
There is something to the mantra for a borderless society — learn collectively, and push each other to do better, be better, live better, while holding onto a rootedness in our own unique cultures and history.
