Learning How to Follow

I grew up following Carmen Sandiego.

She was always in motion.

Between the computer games and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? on PBS, Carmen slipped across borders, moved between cities and continents, and left clues instead of conclusions. You learned facts along the way, and captured her henchpeople, of course, but that was never what stayed with me. What lingered was the structure of the pursuit itself: the sense that knowledge unfolded through attention, not urgency, and that success didn’t always mean resolution.

Carmen was defined less by what she did than by what she refused to give. She was intelligent, composed, and perpetually in motion. There was no final confrontation, no moment of dominance where the game collapsed into victory. Even when you followed the clues correctly, she remained intact — never reduced to an ending. The movement mattered more than arrival.

Looking back, that feels unusual. Most games reward speed, certainty, and completion. They push toward an ending and treat delay as failure. Carmen Sandiego did something quieter. She assumed curiosity could sustain itself. She trusted that learning didn’t need a finish line to be meaningful.

What strikes me now is how calm that process felt. There was pressure to think clearly, but not to rush. You were encouraged to pay attention — to geography, to history, to patterns — without the threat of punishment for taking your time. The world was presented as something to understand, not conquer. You followed trails. You made inferences. And sometimes, you simply didn’t arrive where you expected.

I didn’t experience that as frustration. I experienced it as permission.

Carmen was never framed as a problem to be solved once and for all. She wasn’t a villain in need of explanation, nor a prize to be claimed. She existed as a moving figure — self-contained, unknowable, unconcerned with whether she was fully understood. You weren’t asked to defeat her. You were asked to keep paying attention.

That distinction mattered more than I realized at the time.

As a child, the world already carried plenty of urgency. There were expectations to perform, to decide quickly, to be right. Against that background, Carmen Sandiego offered a different rhythm. She suggested that intelligence could be playful rather than competitive, and that not knowing everything immediately was part of the pleasure, not a flaw.

There was also something quietly instructive in the fact that Carmen was a woman whose authority was never explained. She didn’t justify her competence or soften it for the viewer. She didn’t slow down to be understood. She moved freely through the world, and the task was to follow thoughtfully, not forcefully.

I think that stayed with me.

Years later, seeing her reimagined in the Netflix series Carmen Sandiego only reinforced what had always been true — her power was never about being caught, but about moving freely and on her own terms.

In retrospect, Carmen Sandiego taught me that some pursuits aren’t meant to end cleanly. That learning can be ongoing without becoming anxious. That attention is its own reward. And that it’s possible to care deeply about a search without needing to own what you’re following.

What mattered was learning how to look — patiently, curiously, and without panic.