Review

Culture

Film & TV

Holidays/vacations

3 June 2025

5 min read

Race across the world: you can go fast and go far

Forget the tight travel connections; it’s the human ones that enthral us.

Lauren Westwood

Lauren writes on faith, community, and anything else that compels her to open the Notes app.

Contestants in Race Across the world stand in front of neon-lit Chinese street scene

Ready to race.

BBC.

After years of peer pressure, my husband and I have joined the bandwagon and become Race Across the World evangelists. The BBC series, currently in its fifth season, follows five competing duos on an expedition between far-flung locations with limited resources and no forward planning.

Viewers love the show wherever they are in the world. In America, The Amazing Race, which has a similar format, is now on its 38th series.

‘No flights, no phones,’ boast the rules – but Race Across the World is a far cry from retreating to simpler times before smart devices and online banking, nor does it shy away from the complexities of modern life. Though there is a cash prize, the format of Race Across the World prioritises connection over competition. Each episode is a picture of messy, frantic humanity and examines how we cope in an environment where all we really have is each other.

The challenge is real. In the current series, the couples trek across China, Nepal and India, the start and end checkpoints spanning more than 14,000km. This cohort is an eclectic mix: two sets of slightly estranged siblings, teenage sweethearts from Wales, former spouses and a mother and son. Their vulnerabilities, as well as their triumphs, take prominence. In their conversation and in confessional, each person demonstrates a remarkable willingness to face the hard stuff of life with resilience, tenacity and enough convivial spirit to please the production team.

This emotional depth maps the physical and logistical demands of the race, as the viewer follows the pairs’ fast-paced journeys, stopping occasionally to enjoy some wonderful view amid countless train stations and overnight busses.

My sympathy derives from a belief that I would fare horrendously as a contestant – I think my excellently organised, exceedingly patient husband would flat-out refuse to compete with me. But the wider response to Race Across the World is one of empathy. Unlike similar shows, we are not called to blindly favour for the frontrunner, but to enjoy spending time with and bearing the burdens of all. We feel every frustration of the missed shuttle that just departed. When the ferry disembarks late due to poor weather, our response is not to scoff, but to share, in some small way, their lament. As their successes and failures are magnified, so is our compassion, willing them not to get lost in comparison’s snare but to keep moving forward.

Race Across the World exhibits the reality of community, speaks to the ache of life’s unpredictable nature, and extends grace for struggling humanity. We learn, alongside those racing, that the point is not always to fix our frustrations, but in being able to sit with them, to acknowledge disappointment rather than dismiss it, and to allow setbacks to spur us onto the next step. Sometimes, things get hard and we acutely feel that a situation is beyond our control. What have we then? Still, each other. Still, communion. Still, God.

Most of the time, the competitors’ issue does not disappear; they arrive at the checkpoint 24 hours late, they board the wrong train, the persistent typhoon ruins their chance of first place. But this hardship renews their strength and determination, promoting the notion that while suffering is never easy, it somehow shapes us. We endure and, in that endurance, we are refined and strengthened in ways we never thought possible. In the testing of our own endurance (or lack of), it turns out that some things actually are immovable.

This resilience permeates to the heart of who we are, forming us into people who can carry disappointment and hope simultaneously. It is an unwavering, defiant hope that finds us and never leaves us stranded. From this new position, fresh possibilities arise out of a deeper satisfaction, a greater victory, than found in being first place. This hope is rooted in something deeper, and it cries from the other side of difficulty: ‘Here I am, not lost.’

In his poem, Vow, Roger McGough reminds us that when,

Things seem to go from bad to worse,

They also go from bad to better …

Trains run on time,

Hurricanes run out of breath, floods subside,

And toast lands jam-side-up.’

It speaks to how the relatively small disappointments help us cope with the bigger stuff of life, the stuff we feel we will not emerge from. In the gritty, heavy, unfair stuff of life, we appreciate the weight of the enduring hope we possess, manifested in the belief that things not only can, but will go from bad to better. This is not a fragile optimism, but a fortitude and faith that sees the world as it is yet maintains that good and better is possible.

In the same way, Race Across the World urges us to consider what we can handle – not in our own strength, but in community, in reliance on another. Though our complex, strained humanity may attempt to deter us, life’s hardships are eased when shared, whether on a televised journey or from our sofas. We are strengthened in, by and through devoted community. In keeping pace with another – slowing down or rushing to keep up – we are mutually inconvenienced, and that is a source of beautiful fellowship. In letting go of the things that enslave us to self – ambition, insecurity, pride – we encounter the gift of each other, and give life to love that serves. We commit to community; we choose connection over competition.

The saying goes, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ In Race Across the World, significant effort is understandably made by competitors to go fast and to go far, to place first and take home the cash prize. But the viewer’s delight is not so much in seeing the winning duo cross the finish line, as in witnessing the journey of two muddling through, sharing the load, bearing burdens and multiplying joys.

In our lives, too, the road can be unpredictable, full of detours, missed buses and, yes, a few painfully overpriced cabs. Yet it is in the community of fellow travellers we learn the worth of endurance, the refining possibility of suffering, and the hope that is cultivated in its place.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.