Things Begin

After a six-week absence, I returned to the United States for the holidays, and as I suspected when I left, things are not the same. I do not mean the colder weather, or the political climate, or any outward appearance. The place feels different, as though it isn’t home any more. As I drove through some familiar streets this afternoon, I could not help but feel that I was driving through the past. Maybe the people hadn’t changed, but I had.

The traveler always changes in this fashion. When returning, whether after six weeks or six years, a person’s former neighbors may look exactly the same, wearing the same expressions, the same frowns, the same addictions, having the same sex in the same positions, hooking down the same blonde roast coffee with a teaspoon of sugar and a dairy farm of cream.  They may shuffle down the same aisle of the grocery store with the same limp and suffer from that same hacking cough. It may look as though nothing has changed since the day the traveler first set out, but in fact everything has.

A shift in perspective determines all. This is one of the joys of travel, and one of its most profound lessons. You could return to your old hometown, your old job, your old patterns of existence, and your interactions with people will reveal that their attitudes have remained more or less constant. They have not changed their routines by picking up and moving elsewhere, and you have. What has changed is you. Other people may have had a similar experience at one point in time, but they haven’t had your experience, so you realize immediately just how different you have become. If you have gone abroad and experienced a revelation, do not expect anyone back home to understand it. Even if we may do it in a group, travel is a personal journey, and the new insights and perspectives color everything, from the way people relate to us in our former homes to the way we relate to them to our perceptions of our old lives and the areas that once housed us. It is as if we are walking in a different time and breathing a different air than the person standing next to us in line at the grocery store. A comparison really isn’t accurate, because you are walking on a different shore. If you travel to a place and it impacts you, works its way into your soul, then no matter where you may wander, you are there, even though years may lie between you.

I now walk in many places. I eat and drink in many different cafés, soak up the sun on many beaches, converse with many people in multiple languages. It looks like I am walking down a rainy street in western Oregon on the nineteenth of December, but I am not, not really. Only the body is doing that, not the mind.

Sometimes you return to discover that home is no longer home. Sometimes you have to realize that your own growth has taken such a leap and has gone to such a place that you now need to operate in a different surrounding in order to continue to evolve. Again, it is not your old neighbors’ attitudes that are different, it is you. Old ways of being no longer suffice. Rather than support, they stifle. Rather than nourish, they destroy. This is what people mean when they say you cannot go back. Indeed, why would you? Your old life is gone; your old ways of thinking and being have disappeared.

In our journey, while our plan is to return to western Oregon from May to October, for me the United States has been dead for years. Yes, there is always a political element to this, as even the most willfully unaware still harbor their opinions. The reality, though, extends back in time, all the way back to 1989 at the most obvious, and possibly even earlier. During the summer of that year I participated in a cultural exchange program and spent several weeks with a host family in Gijón, Asturias, on the northern coast of Spain. What I experienced amazed me, and despite the fact that I have not returned, I have never left. I never did leave the atmosphere of zeal and conviviality, where spending quality time with friends and family is a prominent social value. Lunchtimes spread over the course of three hours, not fifteen minutes spent hoarking down a microwave burrito. Life is meant to be enjoyed, and the Spanish seized on this and exuded zest and love at every turn. In Mexico, despite the slower pace, I have found much the same.

As Americans, we need to examine ourselves. Our culture moves at warp speed. Some love this. Why? Some never question it. Again, why?  Why is frantic activity a value? Our society rewards greed, and values economic productivity over social relationships and the greater good. It truly is every man for himself. Feast while your neighbors drown, and give thanks that you are so “fortunate,” and have averted their catastrophe. You are not fortunate; you have not averted any catastrophe. You live in one and do not know it. When catastrophe surrounds you, are you not affected?

Rather than look closer at our situation, we place blame: other people’s misery is entirely their fault. They asked to be born into a system stacked deliberately against them. Right, thats got to be it. And please don’t bring karma into it; if you turn a blind eye and do nothing to address the problem, that bad karma belongs to you. As a nation we have lost sight of our founding principles of individual liberty and equal opportunity, as well as our pride in taking in the downtrodden from all over the world, those who simply want to live a better, more dignified life. Our contributions used to be valued; now some of us are banned, targeted, “bad hombres.” We may preach union, but we are not united. We do not value togetherness. Instead of caring for each other, we exalt and emulate sociopathic, dog-eat-dog, hyper-aggressive and hyper-masculine behavior, materialism to the core, and the commitment to do everything but move away from the brink of chaos and destruction. We make ourselves suffer in an effort to accumulate sparkling, shiny objects. We race home from a twelve-hour day and lock our doors. We are a moth fascinated by an open flame. If you have met the collective definition of success, if you appear comfortable and have accumulated stuff, houses, cars, fat bank accounts, then why are you so unhappy? Some of you may insist that you love this, you adore your life, but I don’t buy it. I spent years playing the game, almost half my life, graduating from college, going to professional school, starting a professional career, buying the house, the car, etc. I have found it lacking. I am 46 years old; we cannot say I haven’t tried with the relationship. I have taken antidepressants and gone to counseling more than once as I tried to fit in and find my place. Isn’t that the American way? It does not have to be. For me, it is over. We may be doing this move in pieces and it may look disjointed, but it has been years in the making, like the end of all relationships. Sometimes you just have to say goodbye. People can grow apart from countries as well as they can from other people. People evolve; things end. Things begin.