If you have built castles in the air,
Your work need not be lost—
That is where they should be.
Now put foundations under them.
- Henry Thoreau
When I’m ‘on’, there’s a certain thread running through all of my days, making me feel as though the world’s a place with a good breeze and a lot of valid chances … I feel strong and confident, running on a certain faith that the things I believe in most—the importance of staying open and receptive to new cultures and ways of life, the soul-liberating nature of travel, the all-important value of interpersonal communication and service—will be affirmed for me somewhere out along that distant horizon where the castles I’ve built way up high in the air await the completion of the foundations I toil over day after day.
When I’m ‘on’, It feels as though I’m riding the coattails of some benevolent giant, in a way, hanging on for dear life to a sweet, sweet feeling that threatens to outstrip me if I don’t let the choke off of my exuberance. I’m not sure how other people think about exuberance, but I’ve come to view it as the most valuable form of expression we humans have. Pure, unbridled joy is a blazing and beautiful thing, and so rarely expressed in this world. Yet when it comes, it inspires crowds. It inspires action. It inspires hope and changes for the better. That giant with the long coattails isn’t trying to leave us behind, after all … he’s just trying to show us the speed it takes to catch our dreams.
That’s me, though: that’s what I conceptualize on the inside where I don’t usually let people look. Maybe I read Roald Dahl’s “Big Friendly Giant” too many times as a kid, who knows. But I like viewing exuberance through the lens of giant steps, where all of us are hurtling along in a land of magical realism, and if we’re lucky, we’re sharing our ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ with as many our fellow travelers along the way.
You, undoubtedly, have your own frame of reference for life’s goodness, and only you know how it feels inside when things are flowing and you can maybe—just maybe—make out the contours of the road ahead and the things you’re meant to do.
Yet the truth of life is that we’re not always ‘on’, as all of us have come to figure out in our own separate ways. Jobs get old or lose their sparkle, people disappoint us, or maybe we just feel alone in a place far from home. Whatever it is, I think all of us experience times where it’s difficult to shift gears … difficult to find the velocity to be adventurous.
I worked part-time on an adult psychiatric ward for several months the summer before I came here, and things have been so crazy this year with all of the ‘change’ that Peace Corps involves that I’ve hardly had time to process the experience. Yet lately some of the more vivid memories started creeping back into my skull. Some of the patients were so far out that it was hard to really get a read on what was troubling them. With no training or prior psychiatric experience, those were the times when I felt like I was in over my head … those were the times I wondered why I’d been drawn there in the first place. But then there was something magnetic about it at the same time that I couldn’t deny, and which kept me up at night: all of that emotion and pain felt more real to me, sometimes, then the masks and fakery you sometimes experience in the America of offices and suits and 401k statements. Out there, sometimes, it felt miserably lonely. Too many people believing that tears and laughter were unacceptable forms of expression in a world with such serious problems to solve. I, however, feel that the world’s problems are such that they’ll never be solved unless people recognize the value of sharing … on all levels, from resources to feelings. So the psych ward was a change of pace, I guess you could call it. A world of stories and lives halted in mid-step, and a chance to connect and learn from all of them, and maybe, maybe, help somebody just a little. Although there were more tears than laughter, it was something, at least.
There were recent college grads, mid-twenties people who had just lost their jobs, late-50s men whose wives had left them, and all of their stories were sad and troublesome. I could tell, with a few of them, that they’d lost the thread of whatever it was that had held their days together, and they were struggling to rediscover their reason for going on. They remembered what it felt like to catch the coattails of some benevolent giant of happiness, and they cried for the loss of that feeling. They needed a place to rest, a place to reassess, and a place where people—even if we were paid to do it—would sit down, look them in the eyes, and listen to the swirling thoughts inside their skulls. It was powerful, and it was instructive. It made me think hard about the choices I was making, the choices I’d already made, the people in my life … the whole shebang. It made me re-analyze my decision to join the Peace Corps, and I came away from that summer believing in the spirit behind this thing we’re all doing even more than I had before: in a country like America that makes it so easy for its young people to feel like cogs in a wheel, institutions like the Peace Corps that encourage searching and community and cultural sensitivity are essential.
So the summer ran out, I flew to Peru, and I found myself thrown into a fog of culture change and language differences and homesickness and general emotional malaise that I think I’m only just now getting a handle on, 10 months later. To say that I “lost” that thread would be understatement: I’ve never cried so much in my life as I have in this country, nor have I ever had so many listless days where even the bright, hot sun of Tumbes couldn’t cut through the shades of gray.
But I’m beginning to feel my speed pick up again, here in this little Northern Peruvian town surrounded by banana and plantain trees. I’m beginning to remember the playfulness in my heart, and I’m finding that laughter has replaced crying as my dominant expression of emotion. What did it, finally, was communion with others … what did it was a small group of other volunteers, their willingness to share of themselves and the wisdom gleaned from their walks through life, and their time. Where before it felt like I had put life on hold back in the US in order to come here, now it feels like my life is clipping along at an insane pace, and I have a cast of characters around me, spread out from north to south throughout this eclectic countryside, all of whom need communion, too, in order to puff up their sails and give flight to their exuberance.
As I traversed up and down the Peruvian coast and back to America for my first return visit in June, I found that in each place I visited, be it Chaclacayo, Lima, Pennsylvania, the Delaware shore, Washington, or Pacasmayo, I encountered friends. I encountered people willing to sit down and make eye contact. Willing to tell stories. Willing to give of themselves. I spent a day and a night with my old host family from training, and was overjoyed to find that our connection still remains and their lives are full and happy. I spent a day and a night with the new class of volunteers—here’s to you Peru 15, welcome—and I got a bit emotional watching all of their faces and hearing the uncertainty and expectancy in their questions. I went for a run through the streets of Chaclacayo early one morning and realized on some guttural level just how far I’ve come in six short months since our training period ended. And then I went home to Pennsylvania, and I sang and danced and talked the days away in a flurry of exuberant motion. And then I returned to Peru, half expecting to feel pain and heartbreak upon my arrival. Instead, I felt a surge of hope. A friend called to make sure I was ok, and within 24 hours I was surrounded by a merry crowd of volunteers, some of whom I already feel a very close kinship with. I realized that I have community here, and I have connections that inspire me and make me want to live life hanging on the coattails of that elusive zeal that touches us all on our sunniest days. Friends who make me laugh and feel joyful. Other volunteers whose direct and confident pursuit of good works in their sites buoys my faith in humanity.
A favorite author of mine, the late David Foster Wallace, wrote this about personal freedom and communion with others, about service and the authentic display of emotion:
“There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the ‘rat race’ - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
None of us feels ‘on’ all the time. That’s not how life works. But I wanted to write this article for all of us volunteers—all of us—who are here, each of us striving in our own ways to put our best-selves forward, to do our best for our new families and the families in our new homes. America is a big place, with a lot of big problems …. yet the freedom it has afforded us, the freedom to choose this walk and to choose to serve others in whatever ways we can find—that’s a strong weight on the positive side of the scales. I wanted, initially, to write some sketches here about a few people in my site who have inspired me to action, or given of themselves, or taught me some vital truth about Peruvian life. But this came out instead.
I believe sometimes we all forget just how important the little bits and pieces of experience are that make our connections last. Maybe you stop to play a game in the dirt outside your house with a small Peruvian kid, just ‘cause it reminds you what it was like to be that young, to see the world through more innocent eyes. Maybe you linger longer over dinner with your host family, because something tells you that your presence is warmly welcomed. Maybe you go home to visit family after a long time away and it hits you, harder than it ever has before, just how incredibly blessed you really are to call these people ‘yours’ … to be amidst such kind souls.
Sometimes, I believe, we all need to focus on the basics for a while until that old familiar joi de vivre comes back into focus. And when it does, maybe we just need to grab hold for dear life, keeping in mind as we’re whisked away that the people in our worlds need our attention, our awareness, our discipline, our effort. What else are we here for?
