I dunno though.
Sometimes, I think, life tricks us into wanting to answer the ‘bigger’ questions while their answers are still in gestation … our brains, I think, constantly want to define things, to fit happenings and daily sufferings and joys into a plan that we’re consciously acting out. Or at least mine does.
Some stuff works like that after all: we can all think out ‘dream jobs’ or pick a list of graduate schools we’d maybe like to go to down the road—and then we can do our damndest to make sure that the actions we fill our days with help to advance those goals in some fashion.
I guess I’m more talking about the types of ‘bigger’ questions like “What’s my purpose here?” “Will my life have an impact on others?” “Will I get to raise children beside a woman I love?”
You know—the big ones.
As a result, I feel like I’m always two weeks ahead, or even six months ahead, or a year for that matter. I’m always up in my head, rolling out possible narratives for my life, thinking through the arc of my actions.
And it cuts into my presence, to tell you the truth.
I guess the trick is to take firm hold of the big questions that you have some control over, and to let go and have faith that you’ll ‘live your way into the answers’ on the bigger, existential ones, as Rainer Maria Rilke says.
I’m determined to start ‘letting go’ a bit more … ‘living my way’ into whatever lies on that distant horizon. I’m determined to try to live more intentionally within the passing minutes and hours as they stack up, one on another. I want to soak in the peculiarity of my present condition—to really notice the poignancy of the ordinary stuff I do each day in Peru … stuff that, a while ago, I would never have considered all that ordinary.
For instance, here’re the two experiences that prompted me to sit down and write this:
Just before dinner I went outside on the front porch to wait for my host father to finish getting ready. My host mother and two little host siblings are away on vacation, visiting family in Lima, leaving my host father and I to a week and a half of awkward male bonding and simple meals.
Sometimes, when we’re sick of the simple meals, we go out to eat in the next town over. This was one of those nights.
So I’m out on the porch, waiting, and my next-door neighbor’s little girl—just 1 and a half—comes tottering out into the darkness. And before I go any farther, I must say that this is the most adorable little black-eyed, round-cheeked, vibrant little person I’ve ever met. The girl is just HAPPY—all the time (or at least when her mother isn’t yelling at her for some ridiculous infraction). I adore this little girl, and I get a huge smile on my face and my voice goes up about two octaves every time I see her. As a result, I think, she has taken a shine to me—probably because I’m the goofiest thing in her universe.
Anyway, she sees me, and she comes running over with her arms out, gurgling something only she can understand, but clearly wanting to be picked up. So I pick her up. And as she’s standing there on my lap, she just starts dancing! There’s cumbia music blaring on the sound system in our house, where my host father is still preening, and we’re out there in the dark, I’m sitting on this concrete divider between the two porches, and she’s dancing as she stands there in my lap, one hand stuck in her mouth because she’s teething like mad. She’s dancing, and she’s grinning through the hand that’s in her mouth.
And … well, I felt a giddy happiness, then and there, a presence, an exultation just to be witnessing this beautiful little child exult in the beats drifting at her in the darkness. Given the choice between one or the other in that eternal dichotomy of innocence and experience, innocence is definitely the state I wish I could freeze myself in … yet, that not being possible, I guess I’ll just have to settle for these few moments when I can revel in the presence of children.
Second experience: After dinner I was still hungry, and so, in the spirit of trying to be healthier after the great “Christmas Holiday/America is Awesome Binge”, I pulled a giant carrot out of the fridge and went to sit on the front porch to cut it up and eat it. One of the little neighbor boys promptly came up and sat next to me and basically asked me why the hell I was eating the thing RAW. You don’t really eat raw veggies if you’re Peruvian and live in Tumbes.
I told him I was eating it raw because it was tasty … and I cut him off a hunk. Mind you, this was a GIANT carrot, very thick, so the hunk I cut off was massive. So he’s chawing on this thing, and asks me again whether I thought this stuff tasted any good.
Yes, I said, I think it does. Do you?
He said that it pretty much tasted good (but I guess he was still skeptical).
From there, he proceeded to accept, and chaw on, three more large rounds of the carrot, before turning down the final bite. During the eating, we talked about how Americans like to put dressing on their salads, whereas people in our town usually put just lime juice on theirs. We talked about how a kid in his grade had been having vision problems, and the doctor told him to eat a lot of carrots, just like this one, raw … and, well, he looked like a rabbit (according to the boy). So I asked him why, blatantly playing dumb, and he informs me in this very learned voice that rabbits eat a TON of carrots, clearly amazed that I did not know this fact. One of my current favorite pastimes is to play dumb with Peruvian children, allowing them to explain really simple concepts to me … I feel it helps me remember what it was like to be that age, and to think in that specific, focused way.
Then, without missing a beat, he says, “See you tomorrow Gregory, I’m going next door to play” … and off he goes.
My day, aside from these two flashes, was really kinda crummy … all anxious and off-kilter, as I tried to get my heart behind the idea of living in Peru for another 10 or 11 months. My family and friends in America, and my beautiful girlfriend in America, are ridiculously supportive, loving, and just flat-out fun … and being home for two weeks definitely reminded me of all that I’m missing back there. I miss them so, so much right now, just a week removed from my last visit.
But looking at it as “the life I’m missing”: that’s just one way to look at it, and it’s not the way that dominates my thoughts, luckily.
In general, I’m overjoyed to be here, still, even after 16 months of it. My life has become this, here, more than anywhere else … and by that I mean that I’ve allowed myself, somewhere in there, to accept that my friends and support network here are powerful forces in my life, my job is currently here (and it’s cool), and I have a family here that, while dysfunctional and loud and enveloping (given the dimensions of the tiny little house we share) cares for me, and for whom I care a great deal as well. And each day is a challenge, which is something I hope to replicate wherever I go after this in life. I don’t want to ever be bored.
I just read this Don Miller book, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”, and in it he talks all about his efforts to write his own life—or, rather, to live a more interesting story with his life. He’d been writing, successfully, for a long while, and—as he tells it—the way of life he’d been living just suddenly seemed empty and shallow. He wasn’t chasing the girl of his dreams, he wasn’t going on adventures—he was bored. He was filling pages like crazy, he said, but his life was a blank page. So he set out to live a better story. I won’t spoil it by fleshing out any more, but it’s a good read for anyone with early-2011-trouble-defining-how-I’m-going-to-tackle-this-year-angst like me.
And, while “our lives as either boring or great stories” sounds simplistic, I devoured the book, because I think it’s a message that needs to be thrust into our faces—because sometimes the most facile messages are the ones our consciences glaze over, like that statue in your parents’ living room you never see anymore because it’s been there for decades.
Each of our stories has a chance to be epic if we can harness our innate courage and let it shine out every day. If we can just learn to quiet the depressing voices that tell us to be quiet, to sit still, to forget about contacting so-and-so because the message you want to send is too mushy and emotional. If we can just learn to leap at our biggest dreams, ass-over-elbows, heedless of the consequences of failure … because hell, shitty consequences are better than boredom anyway, and sometimes you succeed without even failing once. Sometimes.
This is why I watch the great Bill Murray Christmas classic “Scrooged” every single Christmas: he ends it singing “Put A Little Love In Your Heart” with a crowd full of people, talking about how Christmas is that one day of the year where people are receptive to drastic changes, to connecting with long lost loves, or long lost friends, or whoever. I feel it helps me slide into the New Year with a bubble of hope atop my head.
And so, without further adieu, I wish you all a Happy New Year, and I hope the stories you’re living are exciting and gripping—and if they’re currently not, I wish you courage and strength and fortitude as you begin to make them so.
Let me leave you with a passage that’s been really important to me over these past few months. I feel it speaks to the heart of what I’m long-windedly trying to say. Maybe the future, after all, is really more of our choosing than we think.
If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there,--is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.
The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to to other people), we will feel related and lcose to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary—and toward this point our development will move, little by little—that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them.
Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still … but we move in infinite space.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet”
