A couple weeks ago my good friend, a friend I’ve known my entire life since our dads were best friends since high school, came by my apartment and he told me all about his job as an airline pilot. He graduated with an aviation degree almost two years ago and is just starting out on the career that he dreamed of since we were young. In grade school we’d play baseball in eachother’s back yards, and since I lived close to the airport he would always pause the game at hand to look up at the jets flying overhead and could identify their make and model. This was when we were probably 11 or 12.
About a month ago I saw a best friend of mine move off to graduate school at Princeton Seminary. It’s something he’s pursued ardently for the last 5+ years. Years ago we used to sit at the late night coffee houses on Hennepin Ave and discuss whatever theology or philosophy we’d been reading and debate the finer points of reformed cosmology. Having just finished his bachelor’s at Augsburg in May, he’s now gearing up to begin his first grad school term in New Jersey. Before he left, our group of friends got to do a lot of sweet stuff: road tripped 5 hours north to see Queensryche play at a casino, had our minds blown by Springsteen at the Xcel center, went up north and drank whiskey over a campfire with rock n’ roll blasting on the car stereo until the early morning. Another night we all staid up having beers in the garage and watching a thunderstorm roll in until the birds started singing at first light.
Its things like this that make me glad that I’m here in Minnesota in 2009. You really cannot match getting to watch close friends and family members doing things they love to do, pursuing new opportunities, growing, learning and most of all, doing it because they are being true to themselves.
I came back from Kyrgyzstan last year during the holiday season. My time there didn’t turn out as I expected it to. It ended in what I have to keep reminding myself was not failure, but a realization of what I needed to do as a duty to myself. I will be more honest than I really could while I was in-country (Peace Corps did monitor our blogs) – I was miserable for a good two months before coming back. It wasn’t a fit for me. I left with the intention to teach, and of course I ended up in a school that allowed me to do anything but that. I hardly taught, but mostly learned passively. I went to get experience living in the former USSR, which I got in a way I didn’t expect, living on the most extreme fringe of the former Russian empire, living day to day without dependable electricity, water or even food, but amidst a people that had only had these modern conveniences for less than 60 years, and with an unmatched tolerance to corruption. I didn’t get to see what I thought I would see. But I saw what I needed.
I think about Kyrgyzstan’s terrain a lot. Riding through the mountains on a road 500 feet above a river that flowed across the country from Uzbekistan to China. I think about my host family in Ivanovka and the granddaughter born a month after I arrived. My host family in Toktogul and the son-in-law who died only a week after I had first met him. I remember standing in the window of a hotel room in Bishkek the night before I left, no heat, no electricity at 10:00 at night, watching it snow, my sleeping bag wrapped over my shoulders and eating a bowl of crunchy noodles which I managed to score some hot water for from a thermos in the hotel’s unattended lobby. I hadn’t showered or bathed for over a week, I weighed 15 pounds less than when I had arrived. I sometimes think maybe the mass lost in body was still there somehow in 6 months of memories and growing emotionally.
I arrived home, searched for jobs, started a job and moved into my own apartment in South Minneapolis all within three months time. I think back to then and how I felt and thought and what my goals were, and I realize that I’ve never been able to “adjust” back to how I thought I would be after re-adapting to life in Minnesota. In the end I’ve finally figured out that everything I did and experienced in the last year changed me, and there’s not much I can do to fight it. Those 6 months, and everything I saw, seem to flash through my mind daily. Over 8 months later and that still hasn’t gone away. It used to haunt me, reminders of how unhappy I was, how it didn’t work out. Now sometimes I hope it never disappears.
Most things that we see as within our control are 99% of the time not. We as Americans like to see the world, and our lives in that world, as nice and ordered, structured with our own goals, pursuits, interests and needs. The “sadder and wiser” man inside me is glad that I learned first-hand that this is not the way of the “great happening illimitably earth.” To paraphrase something my parents always say, and a scene in McCarthy’s “The Crossing,” maps are one thing and the journey another.
All that to say that I now know a joy I’ve not experienced before in my life, or at least not so vividly, something I’ve gotten to experience in the last eight months in Minneapolis. The joy of seeing those close to you happy and successful in their pursuits and interests, alive, thriving and green.
I don’t second guess my decision to join Peace Corps any more. The dissatisfaction I had does not guard me from encouraging any one who wants to do it to pursue it. I needed those moments, I needed to get let down, to see that what I wanted and what I needed were not synonymous. If I hadn’t done it, I would not be so content and at peace as I am this summer. May risk and sacrifice continue knocking on my door. I’m pretty sure that’s the only way we can keep on saying with confidence – ‘I am alive.’ And when we are unable to feel this, may be we can be more true than the philosopher: I dream, therefore I am.
On my way to Bishkek two days before leaving, we drove through a mountain pass over 3200 meters above sea level in late November, arctic landscape and white as far as you could see. There was a semi truck that was hauling oranges north probably from Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. It tipped into a ditch, we drove past and watched a multinational group of Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Russians try to pull it upright with a rope tied to the trailer of a Volkswagen all terrain vehicle. The oranges had burst through the rear trailer door and exploded all over the blindingly white ground. Tens of thousands of them burning and sprawling over the ice. I think of this often. Maybe you could dream of it, too.
“…Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush ‘tie it into my hand’”
-ee cummings
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