Waking Up
There are moments in life when reality hits you in the face. Some of these can be awful (I assume, having not had one myself): the experiences we know as “hitting rock bottom.” Waking up on the floor of a public bathroom. Or one experience I did have: waking up in boot camp after dreaming of being home. In fact, waking up is the most obvious way that reality hits us every day. And yet how many of us have ever thought when waking up: “holy shit, I’m alive?” Though when you consider the fact that death is simply the going to sleep you don’t wake up from, waking up is a miraculous thing indeed.
Today I woke up in Stuttgart, Germany, on a friend’s couch. And in the past several months I’ve woken up in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines. I’ve woken up on buses, on airplanes, in hostels, on couches, and (in rare, blessed moments) in beds in private rooms. But I’ve also woken up when walking through an airport, or down the street, or while talking on the phone.
Wait, what the hell am I talking about?
Most of us spend a majority of our lives lost in neurotic thought. That is, we fall asleep to the world around us, and enter a dream world in which we needlessly inflict ourselves with all sorts of ridiculous suffering. We “daydream”, and fantasize about how our lives would be – and how much better they’d be – were things different. Or we worry about how much worse our lives will get if we don’t play our cards ever so carefully. Burdened with fears, doubts, regrets, and worries, we plod along and miss the wonder of our lives.
I’ve been traveling for more than five months now, and after that long you start to take this foreign life for granted. Especially when making your way on a tight budget through an area of the world as strange to an American as Southeast Asia, I found myself wishing for the familiarity of home. Enough temples, enough foreign food, I just wanted my own place with my dogs, my couch, a TV, and friends nearby to hang out with. I’ve lamented with fellow travelers about the banality of the “travel questions” that we all ask each other when we meet on the road. Every encounter with a fellow traveler is like the worst date ever.
“Where are you from? Where have you been? How long have you been traveling? What made you want to come here? Anything you’d recommend?”
Ad nauseam.
I found myself plodding along, just looking for interesting pictures to post, my only real source of happiness the likes or hearts I’d see on Facebook or Instagram. I wasn’t enjoying this, but at least this trip was making me popular. Then I stopped doing that. I stopped going out and I just sat in my hostel and read books and watched Netflix and I looked forward to starting my new life, my new job (whatever that ends up being), and settling down.
So I was looking forward. Most people look forward or they look back. The present is boring, after all, right? We’d rather go off to the past, with its nostalgic gleam, and visit the moments that we wished we could do again (and this is how we’d do it again). Or we go ahead, like I was, thinking of how grand life will be. Weirdly, I even looked forward to future travel trips, which I imagined would be much more full of adventure and excitement. I thought of a quote by the late Anthony Bordain, which is worth repeating in full here:
“I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies”
I, too, wanted the world to be like the movies. This trip was bunk, I thought, because I’d done it all wrong. Next time I’d plan better. Next time I’d have more money. Next time I’d be more adventurous. I’d do it right. Next time.
The Banality of Life
The trouble is that life isn’t like the movies. Foreign places don’t just blow you away. It isn’t so endlessly fascinating and exciting and wonderful. You land in Moscow (I have), or get off a bus in Phnom Penh, or even walk around Tokyo (Bordain’s favorite city), and you don’t feel lost in an exotic dream. A club in Moscow actually feels exactly like a club in America. So does a club in Jerusalem. Walking across Shibuya crossing feels like walking across the street – which is what you’re doing. Eating lamb with your fingers tastes the same as eating it with a fork. And lamb tastes the same everywhere. So does every other food.
So what’s Bordain talking about? Well, in part, he’s talking about a romantic idea of how the world should be, an idea that is mired in this tendency of ours to look everywhere but the place in front of us. Man, the world must be so exciting. Too bad I’m stuck here, in this lame living room. And what happens to us when our lives become exciting? Well, the word we usually use isn’t “exciting”, but rather “stressful” or even “terrifying.” When I tried to buy ecstasy in Amsterdam and got robbed at knifepoint, it didn’t feel exotic. It’s true that in that moment I wasn’t thinking about other places. But if I could have made a wish it would have been to go to a boring living room.
The point is, it’s all a fiction. There are no places in the world that, if you go there, you will find yourself lost in an odyssey of pure excitement and bliss. This must sound incredibly pessimistic, and in perhaps stark contrast to much of what I’ve written before. Hopefully I don’t lose you, though, because there’s an important point I’m trying to make. It may be the most important thing I know.
Why do our own lives fail to amaze us? Saint Augustine said that, “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.” Compared to our imagination of what our lives could be, our actual lives always seem lackluster, even when we’re doing the very things that others dream about. Even when, in my case, I’ve been doing the very things that I myself dreamt of just last year. I’m seeing the places that I wanted to see. I rode a boat into the heart of the world’s oldest jungle in Malaysia. I spent two days riding a tuk-tuk around the Angkor Wat temple complex. I’ve gone diving off the islands of Thailand and in the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve eaten street food in Penang, and a mince pie in Hobbiton.
I even had the exact opportunity that Bordain mentions in my trip to Cambodia. As I stumbled out of my overnight bus at 4:30 in the morning, I was greeted by an eager man who asked me if I wanted to go fire an AK-47. I told him, truthfully, that I had no interest in spending my money to shoot an AK-47. And I still don’t have any interest in that. But amazingly, when I read that quote from Bordain I felt like I should have done it. I’d missed an opportunity. I’d fucked it up.
Thoughts like this lead to regrets. Just as looking forward to life ignores the fact that we tend to be dissatisfied with nearly everything that happens to us, looking back to the past reminds us of all the ways in which our lives could be better were we only more skilled or disciplined or brave. But Bordain did it all. He lived a life that would crush us all with envy. Then he hung himself. There is no more persuasive argument that these things do not, in themselves, force us into a better state of mind.
The Quality of Attention
What’s the way out of this morass? And what the hell point am I trying to make?
Just this: no matter the content of our lives, it is our attitude toward that content that makes us feel fulfilled or empty. We can feel like Thoreau: totally content and enamored of life while doing nothing more profound than sitting on the porch of a cabin in the woods. Or we can feel like the countless individuals who seem to lead stunning lives but privately suffer from ennui. The difference is in our attention and appreciation for the precious instant of the current moment.
This isn’t a new idea, and I won’t argue any further for its veracity. Most of you have picked up some variant of it from pop culture, or have done reading on it as I have, and those who haven’t or who aren’t interested won’t want a lecture. But this was about reality hitting me, and so here’s what happened. It, like everything in life, will disappoint you.
I was walking into Bangkok’s Suvarnabhami airport (a name which, incredibly, I remembered with only one spelling error), and performing my normal mental task of running through the list in my head of all the things I’d probably forgotten back at the hostel. And as I stressed and checked the board on the wall to see if my flight was delayed, I suddenly thought about the fact that I was in Bangkok. I thought about the fact that in the last several months I’d taken flights all throughout Southeast Asia. While I was doing this, other people were working and waking up for work and looking forward to being able to do some small version of what I’d been, what I am, so lucky to be able to do.
Then I realized I’d forgotten my passport at the hostel.
Fortunately, I always give myself plenty of time before my flights. So I was able to get a cab back to the hostel, get my passport, get back to the airport, and make my flight to Munich.
As I got on my flight I noticed the difference immediately, because my Eurowings crew was a group of white Germans – a stark contrast from the Thai, Indonesian, and Filipino crews I’d had during my flights of the past couple months. They greeted me with the German “hallo!” They didn’t bow.
It was clear that I was leaving Asia. This forced me to reflect on my own experience in a way that was deeply satisfying. I know, I know. All that shit about paying attention to the present moment, and now I’m philosophizing about the value of reflection? “Which is it, you jackass?” Well if god can be three people and one person I can say stay present and reflect sometimes.
What I thought, what is true, is that I’ve been incredibly lucky. Even if I’ve bungled a score of opportunities, even if I’ve been too cowardly to try everything, too timid to throw myself into a foreign culture, and too ignorant to take advantage of every opportunity, I’ve been lucky just to be able to dabble. I’m grateful for that.
There’s a larger point though, and I’m nervous that I’ll come off as disingenuous or naive. But oh well, in life you have to take risks.
We Are Lucky
We are all lucky. We really are. Just to be here. Richard Dawkins pointed out that, “The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara…We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
We seem ordinary. And our lives seem ordinary. Even when they’re extraordinary, they don’t feel that way, unless we pay attention. But the fact is that we are not ordinary. Not in any way. Around the year 1300 Marco Polo was one of the only Europeans to set foot in East Asia. His journey took him 24 years, the majority of his adult life, and he wrote a book that was read and will continue to be read by millions of people about his experience. Today I am one of millions of travelers who nearly effortlessly (despite our frequent complaints about airline security) board airplanes, sit uncomfortably for a few hours, and emerge as if by magic in the midst of foreign places that sell familiar products (I ate Cheetos in the Philippines). Among the great struggles facing us modern folk are slow wifi, differing power outlets, and the ever shrinking barriers of language. I flew from Bangkok to Munich, a distance nearly equivalent to that of Marco Polo’s journey, in ten hours. I write a blog that’s read by a handful of people, because it’s one of thousands.
Not only are we lucky by dint of the fact that we all won the lottery by being born, but we are also born at this time in human civilization. Our technology lets us reach each other in every corner of the globe. I can watch the sun set in Koh Tao and then call my mom as she wakes up in New York. I can keep up, tweet for tweet, with the musings of the leader of the free world (okay, maybe that’s not so lucky). Even if I left everything in my hostel, and it was all stolen, thanks to the internet I can contact my family, who can arrange a plane ticket for me home. I can contact the US embassy, who can replace my passport, so I can leave the country. There are so many reasons to be thankful and to feel grateful, and it is so easy to forget that and worry about how much a cab ride is going to cost, or some other minutiae.
The Bow
This visit to Asia was not my first time in the East. In fact, during my last tour in the Navy I was stationed in Yokosuka, Japan for just over two years. When I was there I picked up a habit that is very Asian: I began bowing to people. This was not an intentional decision: I did not wake up one day and think it was a good idea. Rather, one finds when you live amongst a culture that one can’t help, except by extreme effort (or callousness), picking up certain features of that culture. But I am glad, as I reflect on the practice, that I do it.
In the West bowing has taken on a strictly pejorative nature. One can see this captured perfectly in the heroic refusal of King Leonidas in the movie 300 to take a knee to save his people. And in the modern zeitgeist, of course there’s Ronald Reagan, namesake of my former ship, who began his political career with a speech that derided those who said it was “better to live on my knees than die on my feet.” Bowing is seen as submissive, weak, a conciliatory gesture meant to appease the ruthless nature of tyrants. The move is seen as undercutting the fundamental principle that all people are equal, because equals do not bow to each other.
Except, in Asia, they do. Obviously there are gestures of respect given to authority figures (elders still bow to juniors, but the degree of inclination is less severe). But in general, unless one is extremely disrespectful, everyone bows to everyone else. Far from being a show of obsequiousness and servility, it is a sign that all people, regardless of social rank, deserve some level of respect. This idea has its roots in Buddhism. We are all struggling with our place in the world, with our survival, our bitter emotions, our fears and regrets. All deserve to be acknowledged for this.
I thought about this as I left Asia. I thought about the struggles that I’d seen people facing there. The tuk-tuk driver who drove me through Phnom Penh, who was old enough to have lived through the Khmer Rouge. The man in Siem Reap who, along with his family, slept on the floor of their house so that they could rent their bedroom to foreign travelers. The single moms working as go-go dancers in Hong Kong to provide food for their children in the Philippines. The family that made me one of their own at a homestay in Bali.
Carl Sagan said that “if a human being disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” This is a call for non-violence, but it’s also a reminder to appreciate the fact that there are other humans in this world. Just as we take ourselves and our good fortune for granted, we take others for granted as well. To me the bow is a form of resistance against that tendency. To bow to someone is to say to them, “I see you and acknowledge you.”
On another continent, one I haven’t yet been to (but hope to be fortunate enough to go to one day), there is a greeting “sawubona”, which means “I see you.” But it means much more than that. It means more than just a recognition of ocular sensing of a person. It implies that you acknowledge this person’s dignity, their humanity, their fundamental entitlement to respect and appreciation. It is in this sense that I bow to the places I have been lucky enough to see, and the people that I’ve been lucky enough to meet, in this corner of the world.
さよなら, Asia. じゃまた.
🙂