Triumph and Disaster

"If you can dreams, and not make dreams your master
If you can think, but not make thoughts your aim.
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
and treat those two impostors just the same.
Then yours in the world, my son, and everything that's in it."

My friend Emre, who until recently was a classmate of mine at the Bourguiba school, posted this quote of Rudyard Kipling's on his Facebook page. I loved it immediately but am faced with the distressing situation that I have now gone from discovering pithy sayings in those horrid quotable quote books, to learning of them via FB status updates. I fear that this is a terrible sign of intellectual atrophy. Notwithstanding the embarrassing way in which I discovered it, I love the sentiments expressed in said quotable quote. I find it lovely and compelling, even uplifting. Until, of course, I realized that I fail at each of his suggestions.

I love to travel for all the typical, standard reasons, but also a very significant part of my passion for wandering is the insane luxury of day-dreaming that comes with the hours spent between places. I look forward to flights, and always, always reserve a window seat in order to stare out the window and let my imagination run wild. I dream recklessly, and elaborately, and I am quite certain that I permit these dreams to hold too much power over me.

In thinking, well, thinking is often my goal. When I was teaching, I could not stop thinking about students, their academic success, their personal challenges. I couldn't stop thinking about my lessons, mostly the ones that failed. I thought about these things with the specific goal of thinking-up ways to improve things, to teach a lesson more effectively, to reach a student who seemed alienated. I know that this is not the sense in which Kipling implies. He's referring to thinkers who aim to be lofty in theirs thoughts, and think with the goal of creating a valuable idea. (This would be opposed to the great thinkers who think because they cannot help it.) Fine, I'm sometimes guilty of that too. I want to come up with cool ideas. And I try to.

Per triumph and disaster, throughout my life I'd say that I have tended to meet triumph with glee and elation, and disaster with indignation and anger (well, depending on the disaster). But I think that I have made small gains in this area. I see this year as a triumph, sprinkled with mini-disasters. And I see them both as the necessary results of a year of traveling (or really the necessary result of a year of living anywhere, anytime). My Arabic is not as good as I had hoped it would become. I have no friend in Tunis of a Madame Habibou calibur (my host mother in Niger). I did quite poorly on some sections of the exam, namely the grammar. I have let opportunities slip by, have failed to pursue chances to improve my language, have been lazy with relationships. But I have met these personal disasters calmly, without anger and with little frustration and disappointment. I'm going to attempt to treat triumph calmly too. You are all laughing, I know, as my general reaction to everything is rarely short of hyperbolic. Well, I can try.

I like this likening of triumph and disaster. In the Prophet, Khalil Gibran describes the sameness of joy and sorrow; he describes these emotions as mirrors of one another, two sides of a coin. "For the deeper that sorrow carves into your soul the more joy you can contain." How can you be joyful when facing triumph if you don't know the disappointment, fear, sadness of disaster? I like the challenge of reacting to them as one in the same, of knowing that one could just as easily have arrived at your doorstep disguised as the other.

Still, it's likely that I'll remain still somewhat bewitched by dreaming.