A little over a year since leaving...

The problem with my life these days back in the U.S. is that all sorts of people smarter and more articulate than me keep stealing my damn ideas and publishing them in essays or books. Ahem, Elizabeth Gilbert. But my story is actually better than hers because my end is bittersweet, not sappy, and therefore superior. Happy endings are for schmucks. More on vile Elizabeth later as she merits her own entry. But today I read something quite lovely from a professor giving a speech to freshmen in college. I am slightly embarrassed at how much graduation type speeches resonate with me at the present. Oh well, I forgive myself. Cue Stanford professor guy (William Deresiewicz):

“Moral imagination is hard, and it's hard in a completely different way than the hard things you're used to doing. And not only that, it's not enough. If you're going to invent your own life, if you're going to be truly autonomous, you also need courage: moral courage. The courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone's going to say and do to try to make you change your mind. Because they're not going to like it. Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in with everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made—or failed to make. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.”

I found this article while job searching on-line and quite frankly it made me quite relieved. This professor’s whole premise is that we basically get on a track in life, and keep moving along, keep specializing, keep narrowing our focus. He suggests that maybe we all need time to jump off the track and take a route that is less programmed. Since I have been back in the U.S., I’ve been second guessing myself, wondering if this whole taking a year to travel, rethinking my career was a ridiculous thing to do. And maybe it is and was, but maybe we need a bit more of the ridiculous in this world. I quit my job, my apartment, and my life in order to do things I love, to explore some old passions and find new interests. I traveled completely uninhibited, unplanned and unorganized, something I’ve certainly never done before. And I think it’s time to take some inventory.

I never wrote about the end of my trip. Maybe I should do some backpedaling. I started this blog with an entry wherein I bragged about the fact that I have no keys. I didn’t then in Aug. 2009 and don’t now. Having staged my own successful jailbreak, here’s where I’ve landed a year into unchained living. And yes, I make others a bit uncomfortable, myself included as this directionlessness is so un-American. But the rewards for staging one's own jailbreak can be great.

Inventory of what I (still) don’t have: a job (ok, a real one), a car, a house, mortgage, an apartment, a marriage, children, significant other, financial debt of any kind (and well, needless to say I've got a lot less in savings!). Interestingly I’ve still got no keys.

What I have now that I didn’t have a year ago: A new favorite artist (Mapplethorpe), love of Majda Rumi and Nissar Qabanni, improved Arabic, amazing concerts attended: Chucho Valdés, Adir, Ismaël Lô, La Danse Fait Sa Comedie (incredible, stunning group of dancers from France). I have new friends and renewed friendships, including people I can now visit in Rwanda, Japan, Turkey, South Korean, Tunisia, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Kansas, San Francisco and Florida. I have a wedding in Provence, nights in the dessert, days spent on Mediterranean beaches, and hiking in the Alps. I left soulprints along every step of northern Spain, from the French Pyrenees to the Atlantic, at end of the medieval earth in Finisterre. I have a month in my life in which every single day I drank good wine, ate good chocolate, and walked an average of 25 kilometers a day (and I say kilometers because it sounds longer than miles). A love affair with handsome Uruguayan, complete with romantic chance meeting, tango lessons, and week in stormy Venice with whole days spent not seeing Venice. I have moments and people, food that is delicious, and good conversions that are nourishing. I have thoughts and ideas, time spent thinking and reading, ruminating on Islam in Tunisia, Islamophobia in Europe, the veil, the minarets. How best to teach foreign languages? Is Jazz more alive outside of the U.S.? How will these blood oranges taste with dates, cinnamon and coconut? (Delicious, indescribably delicious) Can a person eat too many vegetables? How much French is really in Tunisian Derja? I also have a good end to a childhood story.

My final days in Tunis were simple and I didn't know how to write about them. I went to my favorite beaches. Saw my friends, shared meals, drank lots and lots of coffee, smoked some chincha (hookah in Tunis) and had conversations. Said goodbye to my favorite places, namely the second-hand market at Ibn Khaldoun where I spent about 40 dollars for an entire new wardrobe. Saw the ruins at Carthage since it seemed silly to leave without at least visiting once. Bought lots of gifts in the Medina, spent hours in the jewelry section, sifting through boxes of treasures, meeting Turkish diplomats. Then I wandered on to buy gifts of olive wood, leather, and Tunisian cotton. I did my final run in the Parc Belvedere. I didn’t cry. I threw my own personal goodbye party to Tunis from the rooftop of my apartment with some chocolate and a bottle of wine, while I listened to noise from the streets and watched the clothes blowing about on the lines above all the apartments under the starry warm sky. Paid my final bills, somewhat of a herculean task but it was accomplished. On the penultimate night I waged a furious battle in my bedroom with an evil cockroach that I initially mistook for a mouse. As we spared, it had the gall to run across my bare foot which caused me to kick it so quickly that I tossed it into the air and it landed on my bed, entangling its stupid self in my bed sheets. Thereby causing me to scream (and clearly change my sheets!). Then it crawled under the bed, where I could finally see its huge antennae twitching, smugly waiting in the dead middle of the space under my bed. Vile beast. Ultimately, I won, and in punishment for touching my bare foot the bug was left under a shoebox with a large rock on top that no one would disturb. The next night, after a final meal of my favorite fish in La Goulette, I left Tunis. Boarded the plane and watched the sparkly lights of the coast fade from view, and felt calm. And didn’t cry.

I never wrote about leaving Tunis because I’m not sure what to make of the end. Sure, I’m back in MN, a place which I’ve never been able to leave completely, yet to which I don’t completely belong. And I feel that the trip is not over. I might keep traveling. As you may have guessed, I have a few other places on my list. But I am going to keep living in a way that is morally imaginative and morally courageous. In forgoing comfort, safety, things known, familiar, and reassuring, I’ve made a very good gamble. Whilst my bank account has taken a serious beating, I feel richer. All these things I would not exchange for any key. Keys are for prisons.

Last night I saw the play The Last Seder. I went by myself, thanks to a really nice guy I work with whose wife gave me a ticket as she’s the stage manager at the Park Square theatre in St. Paul. Having been a participant in a number of very lovely Passover Seders, the whole play felt familiar. And it seemed somehow like I was cheating, as if a Midwestern product of Catholic schools has no business nodding in recognition of the hiding of the afikomen, the open door for Elijah, the why of the bitter herbs and the youngest asking questions. The actors sang dayenu and I hummed along. Then each character took turns saying “if I had only my family and nothing else, dayenu.” It is enough. Or another “if I had only my husband and nothing else, dayenu” and “if I had only this day and nothing else, dayenu.”

As for me, if I had only what this year afforded and nothing else, dayenu. So much more than enough.




P.S. Read the professor’s whole articles, it’s fantastic.
http://chronicle.com/article/What-Are-You-Going-to-Do-With/124651/