Disclaimer: I only know 160 (so far…)

I started learning all the countries in the world because I thought it would be cool to say I could. A fun party trick I suppose?

At first it was just a memory game. Doing the online quiz over and over, making weird little mnemonics, like abbreviations or the story method to help me mass remember names of countries. I’d quiz myself while walking to class, in the shower, while eating, trying to beat my personal best time for listing all the nations in any given continent. 

But somewhere along the way, it stopped being about memorizing names and started being about paying attention.

Because when you commit to learning the names of 195 places, you start realizing how little you actually know about most of them.

Obviously I knew Africa wasn’t a country but has 54 unique countries, each with different languages, economies, cuisines, conflicts, and cultures. That Central Asia exists. That São Tomé and Príncipe isn’t just a cool-sounding name, it’s a whole nation with music, history, politics, people. Of course I knew all that. But I didn’t *know* all that. 

I started seeing the world less like a map and more like a mosaic. 

Some fun things I learned:

1. Bhutan measures its success in GNH (Gross National Happiness) instead of GDP. And it’s the only country in the world that absorbs more carbon than it emits. This is definitely my favorite fun fact. 
2. The sky in Kyrgyzstan is so clear that in several parts, you can see the Milky Way with your naked eye (on my bucket list now?? Search up a picture it’s breathtaking).
3. 90% of Madagascar’s wildlife is found no one else in the world. Isn’t that crazy? 
4. Iceland has no standing army and is consistently ranked among the most peaceful in the world.
5. In Ethiopia, they tell time differently. 6:00 starts when the sun rises, so what you call 7:00 AM, they call 1:00. Also, it’s technically 2017 there (different calendar system). 
6. So many more facts please text me if you wanna geek out over them together :’) 

But mostly, learning all the countries taught me humility. It made me question how much we miss when we only look at the world through the lens of where we live, where we vacation, or what the news tells us is important. It made me realize how easy it is to overlook entire parts of the planet simply because they haven’t intersected with our own lives…yet. 

And the more I learned, the more I realized that this curiosity wasn’t just about geography or fun facts, but it was about wonder. About wanting to understand how the world fits together, and what my place in it really is.

That same feeling hit me again recently when I visited a planetarium. As the screen above me zoomed out from Chapel Hill to N.C. to the USA to the earth to our Milky Way and into other galaxies and beyond,  I felt that familiar tug in my chest: that sense of smallness that’s both overwhelming and grounding. It reminded me just how vast the universe is, and how much of it I’ll never see or understand.

It echoed something I’d been learning in a class on Buddhism. We talked about kamma (karma), which emphasized how our actions follow us not just in this lifetime, but across many, as the “self” is always shifting. That we’re constantly becoming, and yet we’re still part of something larger than ourselves. Whether or not you believe in karma or the idea of past and future lives, one thing is certain: we are incredibly small in the vastness of it all.

In a strange way, memorizing countries, studying karma from Buddhism, and sitting in that planetarium all taught me the same thing:

That I am small.

But in that smallness, there’s room to hold so much.

Because the more I learn about the world, the more I fall in love with it. Not just the countries and their flags, but the quiet mornings, the street food, the old songs, the laughter of people I’ll never meet, and the ones I hold close.

It reminds me that there are infinite ways to live a life.

And in this one, my one small, sweet life, I want to stay curious. 

I want to ask questions, write things down, take lots of pictures, create as much as I can, love people deeply, and pay attention to the little things that make the world feel less like a list and more like a love letter. 

Because maybe that’s what this all is: a practice in love.

For the world.

For the people in it.

For the chance to be here at all.