In the air between Pune and Delhi I think about our communities. We are, in many ways, who we spend our years with. For much of our lives those are choices determined by our parents, by the town they settled in, by the people they sent us to school with. Later, they are our choices, of friend groups and then universities, of majors, of sports teams, and of commitment to each. I have few friends from my home town, none of whom still live there. My Vassar friends are still daily conversations, in the top ten of contacts in my chat apps. I am lucky to have found people in those years, when we were all young and curious. I am lucky to have stayed that way. Scrolling the top ten names in my recent chats shows friends from college, from Tokyo after, from Shanghai after that, from San Francisco, and from Hong Kong. As I’ve said before, there’s a person for each place I have managed to live. I was talking about myself, which is good because there are many people for each place, people who still shape my thinking, who I see and rely on, wherever we all may live today.

Now, of course, I think about our communities for us instead of for myself. I think about who we spend time with, who we rely on, and where that should take us, in this uncertain future. I think about what we are part of, what we bring, and what we gather. Raising a child may take a village, but what kind, and how close do they need to be? Building someone, building three people who are comfortable anywhere, as I have long set out to do, by the very statement demands a variety of encounters, demands a breadth of trust.

And so we wander. We spend a Saturday on the beach with parents of children we know, people who came into our lives in the past three years, who are wavering on the border between acquaintance and friend. Our mutual future is uncertain, will be determined by jobs, by school choices, by the children themselves. In writing that I chuckle at how low on the list our own opinions lie, though of course that’s not entirely honest. Our own preferences are merely the top of a complex filter set, and the biggest change is we are no longer responsible for the scope of possible, for the initial meetings.

We are responsible, though, because of our choices. Hong Kong is a wonderful home, is a place to be part of the world, to meet Brits and locals, French and mainlanders, people rare in our home towns, and even in San Francisco. Our jobs, which take us to Vietnam and Pune, to Dongguan and San Francisco, are the next level, providing the type of encounters we thrive on, true reminders of the scope of humanity. We meet factory owners whose children live in different countries, and factory owners who have taken over for their parents. We meet sales people and engineers who have moved far from their homes for work, like us global migrants in search of employment. On the reverse leg I talked to a man who lives in Delhi and works in Pune, the Monday to Friday apartment life that is familiar to me from many encounters in China, from my father in law. It is the sacrifice of those who are trying to balance their community with their opportunity.

I used to have the longest commute, or so I’d tell my friends. From my apartment in San Francisco to a factory in Dongguan was about 30 hours of travel, from midnight Saturday to around ten am Monday, including two border crossings, one flight, three trains, and an automobile. For most of it I was a quiet migrant, asleep in a tube thirty thousand feet up. Much of it was a series of solo moments, of emails and phone calls, of novels and magazines, of letters written in airports. Occasionally though I’d meet someone likewise en route, likewise repeating these journeys, and strike up relationships revisited years later, in other jobs. Some times I’d meet former colleagues this way, each of us out again in new rotations.

The Pune to Delhi flight is a new rotation for me, far from my familiar grounds, from the routines of my earlier years. I have yet to encounter someone with similar experience, though I encounter many with aspects of the same. I encounter those who have lived in New York, or Texas. Those who have done work in Hong Kong, or Shanghai. I encounter those in tech, or in manufacturing, in startups. Most frequently I encounter supply chain people, our titles belying how much of our jobs involves physically being the glue between nations, between companies, by strapping in and moving back and forth. The goods are mobile, the money as well, and it is just us, asleep in 2A, asleep in 43C, left to keep up and shepherd things along.

I think about how happy this makes me, makes us. How glad we are to meet so many people from so varied circles, fellow migrants in one sense or another. How lucky we are to be out in the world, part of a collective motion so much larger than ourselves. I think about how we are trying to impart an appreciation of this motion to our daughter, and wonder if it will work. And then she asks when she’ll next get to see some children we know in Tokyo, or in New York, or in LA, and I think we’ll be alright. We are building something new, out here in an odd orbit all our own.