From Nowhere to Nowhere and All That Lies Between

The kind of travel to which we aspire should tolerate uncertainty and discomfort. It isn’t about pain or excessive strain — travel doesn’t need to be an extreme sport — but we need to permit ourselves to be clumsy, inexpert and even a bit lonely. We might never understand travel as our ancestors did: our world is too open, relativistic, secular, demystified. But we will need to reclaim some notion of the heroic: a quest for communion and, ultimately, self-knowledge. Our wandering is meant to lead back toward ourselves. 

This is the paradox: we set out on adventures to gain deeper access to ourselves; we travel to transcend our own limitations. Travel should be an art through which our restlessness finds expression. We must bring back the idea of travel as a search.
{from "Reclaiming Travel" by Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison}

This week has begun rather oddly. For the first time since I got my license, I am entirely without a vehicle and have to depend on the graciousness of my family members to get me to and from work and class. Thankfully, I also have a semester pass that covers trains, buses, trolleys, and subways in the area, and today, I very nearly used it for the first time to take the bus home from campus.

Perhaps it sounds silly and naïve, but I was kind of excited at the prospect. I have only once traveled by bus inside the US, and only once by myself. As a creature of habit, I don't ordinarily break out of my comfortable modes of existence, even in trifling instances. Sometimes I'll skip dinner on campus rather than trying to make a decision about where to buy food, because I'm unfamiliar with the various eateries and can't be bothered to explore a new situation. But as a product of the countryside who has just admitted to never really being without a car for the past seven years, even riding the train is still a novel experience, and a bus ride even more so. It has all the excitement of a challenge: coordinating subway and bus schedules, navigating unfamiliar territory, figuring out payment methods without coming across as a total moron, and people-watching.

When we throw ourselves into new situations, we learn stuff.

In my Intro to Interpersonal Communication class at community college, we talked about this concept illustration called a Johari window. Basically, it's a square divided into four quarters, and each quarter represents an aspect of the self in terms of knowledge and awareness: the blind self is the part that others see, but you don't; the open area where what others know coincides with self-knowledge; the hidden area, which is all the parts of your self that you hide from others; and the unknown is that which neither self nor others have had opportunity to discover.

These quarters are not equally divided, nor are they fixed in size. Over time, the parts that involve self-knowledge increase (theoretically - I've been accused of believing too much in the reflective powers of average human beings, but it seems like the more generous interpretation). So too, the parts of yourself that you share may change depending on whether you become more open and trusting, or perhaps begin to shut away more in order to protect yourself in reaction to circumstance and pain.

Since "stuff" is a taboo word for good writing, let me expand my thesis. When we throw ourselves into new situations, our learning experience is two-fold: we learn about the world with its inhabitants,  social construction, and material reality, but also about ourselves as we respond to and situate ourselves within that framework.

The journey to the center of the earth is simultaneously a journey to the center of the self, not in some deplorably egocentric way, but simply because we cannot help but change and grow responsively when we begin to think  critically about the experiences we undergo. That's why I love that quote from Stavans and Ellison's article, especially as I begin mentally preparing myself to leave for Cambridge.

On the one hand, yes, I'm satisfying a dorky preteen's goal to study at one of those old English universities, and as I am receiving my courses and meeting supervisors, I'm increasingly excited by the intellectual opportunities that are open to me. But travel is a holistic educator, and my mind is not alone in readiness. When we remain at home, we have to actively and intentionally pursue discomfort. It will not seek us out, except perhaps when an unpredictable entity invades our perfectly ordered space. But when we travel, we are ourselves the unpredictable entity, challenged to be vulnerable, to be humble, to ask questions, and to dare the awkward and uncomfortable. And if we are malleable and open, suffering the inconveniences and embracing the challenges, then perhaps we shall find that as we invaded the world, it invaded us: we are unable to see with our old eyes or think quite like we used to. You approach things differently when your concepts have faces.

So yes, in the end, riding on a bus is a ridiculous excuse for an adventure. But I can't always afford to be wandering over oceans and time zones, so it'll do for now.

Choosing Crisis

One of the earliest German tales of the Arthurian romances, Erec, was written by Hartmann Von Aue in the late 1100s, and it tells the story of a young knight who sets out on a series of adventures in order to gain a wife, a reputation, and a rightful place in society. Erec begins well and has the best of intentions. After suffering a grievous insult, he travels from the comforts of Arthur's court to the castle of Duke Imain, where he defeats Iders in combat, thereby avenging the insult, obtaining the lovely Enite, and gaining his first victory as a knight. He subsequently marries Enite and distinguishes himself in a tournament prior to journeying home and assuming kingship of his father's lands. There, however, things start to disintegrate. Erec abandons knightly virtues and instead of investing his time in contributing to society, he spends his days lazing in bed with his beautiful young wife. The crime of which von Aue convicts Erec is that of comfort.

What's so bad about comfort? Few of us would deny that we like our luxuries, however small they may be. But the problem isn't just indulgence: it's getting to a place where you're so comfortable being where you are that you forget to grow. 

Forget? Well, yes. Growth is not an automatic process. It is the very intentional result of learning from the potent moments, those times in our lives when we are brought to a crisis point of personal identity (to borrow from Jerome Miller's description in The Way of Suffering), and then acting in accordance with those revelations. We always have a choice in the matter. We can take the easy road and remain more or less static, maybe even regress a bit. Or we can choose the harder climb, which requires not just a once-and-done decision, but also a moment-by-moment commitment to change.

In von Aue's story, Erec recognizes this or, well, something like it (I'm over-simplifying here, okay). He dons his armor, takes his wife, and sneaks away from his castle to enter the forest at night, the place where, in chivalric literature, adventures take place. Throughout the journey thus commenced, Erec denies himself the comforts he permitted previously. He and Enite travel through the night without food, avoid the homes of noblemen where they might dine and rest, encounter dangers and injury, and travel far. Erec refuses even to share a bed with his wife, so committed is he to correcting his error.

Erec follows a typical medieval storyline, in that he swings between extremes before reaching the virtuous state of moderation that von Aue repeatedly praises throughout the story. While such moderation is every bit as important as von Aue states, Erec's journey does suggest an additional point: that growth can be accelerated by intentional discipline. 

We don't always face crises in our lives, not the really big ones anyway. There are only so many loved ones we can lose or big decisions we can make, and there are a lot of "everydays" in between, during which we must somehow not regress into old ways of thinking or acting. How do we motivate growth? Discipline is the process whereby we introduce a myriad of miniature crises into our lives. By determining to do that which we might desire, for our own comfort, not to do, we create a moment of crisis. We are forced to make a choice that we might otherwise have easily avoided. Discipline asks the question over and over, while growth is the sum of consistent, positive responses to that which is asked of us. 

Ultimately, Erec is able to return home and be re-integrated into society. He proves to be a just and respectable ruler, who never yields to the excess of comfort again. And that's the period on the sentence: that not all comfort is bad. It only becomes a problem when it's too much of a good thing. The key to living well is the willingness to dwell in a tension between seeming polarities and to know when to sway to the one side and when to sway to the other. It isn't easy, but when it is done well, it is well worth the doing. And perhaps with time that which once required conscious commitment may become easier to say yes to. At which point: "further up and further in," my friend, further up and further in.

Learning to Live or Living to Learn?

For a very long time, education has been a cornerstone of the typical middle- and upper-class life trajectories. High school students who opt out of higher education are told - with a brick worth of statistics to the head - that they will not make as much money and are perhaps missing out on one of the most important life experiences.

I am a student because I want to be. I have always enjoyed learning new things and exploring new ideas. The world is a beautiful mystery opening itself up to be understood. But I'm not entirely sympathetic to the idea that college is for everyone. In fact, I am not infrequently left wondering whether college is even for me. Let me explain.

This semester, I am taking five classes: Intermediate German, Medieval German Literature, Marxism, History of Modern Philosophy, and Language and Thought. In other words, my classes span foreign language, literature, more-or-less political and economic philosophy, general philosophy (dealing primarily thus far with epistemology and ontology), and psychology. Due to the nature of the school I attend, for each class except the foreign language course, I am required to read from a wide selection of scholarly articles on the subject matter. This means that in the course of a homework day, I'm going from a gender analysis of the Nibelungenlied to three papers on learning-from-observation vs. cross-situational methods of language acquisition, and none of these papers is at an introductory level. Neither of these topics is uninteresting to me (in fact, I'm intensely fascinated by the degree to which Kriemhild and Brunhild are labelled as she-devils or otherwise mocked for transgressing traditional female gender roles), but at the end of the day, I find myself deeply unsatisfied with this system.

Such an educational structure presupposes the path of higher education: that individuals become extremely well-versed in an increasingly limited field, such that they know a great deal about practically nothing. Dr. Jarosinski once used the German term, "der Hauptidiot," to describe such people. It translates roughly to someone who, as just described, knows a lot, but it is about such a small topic that they have basically become stupidly smart. Their knowledge is all depth without breadth. 

Perhaps it reflects a deficiency on my part, but I find it incredibly difficult to make the transition between reading in one field of study to another. The specialized language requires different vocabularies and even simultaneous retention of two different glosses on the same word and/or concept. I'm pretty sure that when Sterling-Hellenbrand talks about the self-other dialectic, she doesn't have quite the same understanding as Franz Fanon or Emmanuel Lèvinas. In a sense, prior knowledge of other subjects, because it is so tenuously grasped only through these relatively inaccessible readings, becomes a hindrance to the study of a repeated concept in a different context. 

The only way to cope with such a burden is either to embrace the challenge (with limited support mechanisms in place to ensure students' success) or to confine oneself, as the academic paradigm goes, to study in a very small area. The first option is what I would call learning to live, that is, receiving a comprehensive education in order to appreciate a wide variety of topics, acquire diverse problem-solving skills, and connect with the maximum number of different people from all walks of life. The second option is what I call living to learn, whereby your primary purpose is to acquire more knowledge about a limited field, using a small but fully master array of skills that do not necessarily translate well to other areas. Unfortunately, the college educational model seems to favor the latter situation.

At a surface level, it aggravates me, because I want to learn about a great number of different things. Whenever people asked me in high school what my favorite subject was, I had serious difficulty responding. Each different subject brought its own unique perspective to bear on the world, and while math might seem dry to the casual observer, the process of pattern recognition and the logical underpinnings are as lively and fascinating as a discussion of the Monroe Doctrine ever could be. I don't want to specialize, and everything within me resists it. 

At a fundamental level, this sort of partitioning denies the interdependence of all subject areas. If you want to become a really, really good psycholinguist, you are almost forced to abandon your casual interest in political philosophy. If, on the other hand, you've devoted yourself to political philosophy, you probably won't have the full flowering of appreciation for Sartre's analysis of time in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. There is a lack of appreciation, not because the individual has not the intelligence necessary to comprehend - most of my classmates are probably smarter than I am - but because he has no room left in his mind to entertain this entirely isolated web of new ideas. 

In the process of attaining to the heights, we struggle long and hard to gain inches, while below us spread the lowlands, rolling, green, and composed of hundreds of square miles of easily accessible and beautiful territory. Why must we fight for a peak, when a brisk, invigorating hike up the foothills will do just as well?

With the facilitation of technology, many areas have made leaps and bounds, not only in the scientific fields, but also in humanistic studies, and while I know there will always be some people who love and pursue their one thing only, it seems to me that this technology-fueled exponential growth has given those people power against the rest of us, who just want to love and pursue a little bit of everything.

And now that I've reached new heights of grandiloquence and flexed my analytical and argumentative muscles, I'm going to undermine my own argument by noting that I do go to one of the top research universities in the world, so duh, there is going to be an emphasis on depth in one field instead of breadth throughout many. But it does seem rather unfortunate that if one wants to be challenged properly and well, one can only do so at an institution that, by its very nature, is not favorable to the mental health and desires of the student.

So Special and So Alone

Some people pursue the news and filter it for themselves, other people let Facebook do the filtering for them. I'm somewhat ashamedly a member of the second group, so most of my article-reading revolves around interesting opinion pieces that show up on Huffington Post, like this one: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy. Perhaps you've also seen the perfectly legitimate response piece: Actually, A Few Doodles Don't Explain Why "Generation Y Yuppies" Are Unhappy.

To sum up both pieces: we of the 20-35 age range are unhappy because we have been told since childhood that we are very special people who deserve fairy tales, so we have set our expectations high, but then reality (i.e. hard work) sets in, and we don't know how to cope with the drop from the Point A illusion to the Point B facts of life. The response piece points out that it's not just a disease of "specialness," but also that certain economic factors have changed with the generational transition, leading perhaps to the change in expectations and language that are so glibly explained in the first article.

I think Herman's critique is a valid one, but I'm not so ready to dismiss the Wait But Why article either. To explain, let me begin with two stories.

The first: A friend of a friend isn't entirely sure what she wants by way of career goals. She thought she really wanted to be a baker or pastry chef, so she procured a job with a bakery. After three days on the job, she quit. Why? Because they had her washing dishes and not doing what she thought she should be doing.

The second: On my first day of this semester, I had ten minutes alone with the professor at the beginning of my German epics class, due to the only other student confusing his schedule. We chatted a bit about our backgrounds, and somehow I came to mention that I feel like I'm so different from most undergraduate students. I'm older by a few years; I commute; I took two gap years; blah, blah, blah. My professor teased me about being so old, and we both laughed, because really, two or three years isn't THAT much different, but there's more to it then that, as I realized when I thought about the incident later.

See, we ARE told from a young age that we're all special and all unique. I can hardly remember a time when teachers, family members, and friends' mothers (much to said friends' chagrin) were telling me how wonderful and this, that, and the other I am. While it's true that I, like anyone else, possess an array of positive attributes, I think it's telling that we've gotten to a point where a villain in a children's movie is trying to defeat superheros, "because when everybody is super, no one will be." It's a thought that everyone has to have. At some point, we face the fact that we are not primus inter pares, but rather, one of many, all of us dependent on each other for our forward motion.

What the friend of a friend's story and my story have in common is this: we both thought we were something special. In her case, that meant that she didn't have to take the low road and do the dirty work to get to the good parts. Life 101: if you're not willing to do the crappy stuff, you don't really deserve to do the fun stuff. But we want it all to be fun stuff, because yeah, we're special right? And in my case, I tend to think that I'm so unique and strange because I took a different route to get to where I am, and oh, I have such lofty goals, etc., but it's kind of silly to think about.

Ultimately there's nothing satisfying in being special. The original article mentions the Facebook phenomenon. We see other people's lives, and we perceive that they're living at the top of the mountain. How did they make it, and we didn't? It's a self-imposed alienation. But the alienation starts long before we ever log on to Facebook. This mentality of specialness contains two poles. First, we become alienated because we think we are better than everyone else, or at least, in my case, different from everyone else in some way (i.e. unique). Then, when that belief fails to play out properly in the real world, we remain alienated because we believe that others HAVE actualized some potential with their endless strings of engagementweddingbabyItalianvacation photos. Being special is like drinking whiskey. You feel all warm inside for a little while, but it's a false defense that can't stand up long against the cold.

So where does that leave us? Well, dependent. I had to write a thank you note recently because I received a named scholarship this year as part of my financial aid package. I honestly wouldn't have applied for a named scholarship, save that the financial aid office asked me to, so I was rather bemused that I was then being called upon to do extra work, all because I got something that someone else wanted for me. While, granted, I may have called upon my more florid writing style to compose said note, it did make me think about how much of my education has nothing whatsoever to do with me.

I live with my sister, who not only has given me a room, but also tons of advice and being-an-adult guidance and a really awesome raincoat to celebrate the fact that I'm going to England. My dad spent his entire Labor Day laboring over the cv axle on my car, because I'm a poor, stressed college student who needs to somehow make her car get through another year. My teachers invest time in lesson plans, homework grading, and somewhat individualized attention, insofar as they are able. Some of them have written reference letters for me or helped me through seemingly endless series of drafts to produce an application-worthy essay. And, as the thank you note reminded me, there are people who are literally paying for me to go to a fantastic school to study a subject that may or may not result in a paying job. Furthermore, at the end of all of this, the hope is not that I will do something personally fulfilling to my special self (although that would be cool too), but that I will somehow contribute to society in however large or small a way, and thereby turn that education toward the betterment of my world.

The point isn't to be special, which really just means to be alone. The point is to be specially suited to a particular role that is a piece of a much greater puzzle, wherein every piece is essential to the completion of the picture, but no one piece can fulfill that task alone. It's much warmer when you're snuggled up with other people than when you're snuggled up with a whiskey bottle, and that's a fact.*

*Not a fact that I know by experience, just so we're clear.

Interlude: Shalom

During my year at IMPACT, we discussed at various points the concept of this thing called shalom. I think that Rob Bell also touches on it in one of his earlier books, but basically the way I've come to understand it is that shalom happens when something about a fallen, broken world is made right. (As the Wikipedia article puts it, "Shalom, as term and message, seems to encapsulate a reality and hope of wholeness for the individual, within societal relations, and for the whole world;" and also, "Literally translated, shalam signals to a state of safety, but figuratively it points to completeness. In its use in Scripture, shalom describes the actions that lead to a state of soundness, or better yet wholeness. So to say, shalom seems not to merely speak of a state of affairs, but describes a process, an activity, a movement towards fullness.")

A peculiar dialectic surfaces throughout the New Testament: the Kingdom of God (the ultimate shalom) is both already and not yet. I suppose you could say that it is, but it is also becoming that which it is. Shalom is this thing, I think, where we're moving and working, seeing small progresses but never the whole picture, but always ultimately growing towards the final proclamation of Revelation 21:

"Behold, I make all things new." 

Words that bring tears to my eyes. Because isn't that one of our deepest desires? Maybe it's not something that you think of right away, but you just have to cast it in a different light. Take illness, for example. You probably know someone who has been affected by anything from multiple sclerosis to Down's syndrome to ALS, someone who "doesn't deserve this." We somehow recognize it as an injustice, and we want desperately for it to be otherwise. Maybe it's a grandparent or a mentor or your best friend from college who is in the prime of life, and how can they be facing cancer now? What we want is some kind of fairness, that these beautiful people should attract more of that which is beautiful and not that which is twisted and ugly.

At the risk of sounding a little strange, that is what I was thinking about when I read this blogpost: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/06/13/154924715/surgery-restores-sexual-function-in-women-with-genital-mutilation

The thing is, something horrible has happened to these women. Their personhood was violated in a cruel way that goes beyond sexual pleasure and orgasms. They have been made into objects by means of mutilation, transformed into passive vehicles for the satisfaction of another person's desire. And while it's true that this happens even to women (and men and children) who have not been physically mutilated, it is yet one more thing that enforces the inhumanity of what has been done to them.

The surgery that Foldes and other doctors are performing, that right there is shalom.  Restoration of what has been lost to the robbed and broken. And no, it's not perfect. It's not 100% effective. But that's the already and not yet, the messy, strange, and beautiful glimpses of what might be, like holes through which we may catch a sight of heaven and come away brightened and transformed by hope.

Maybe it's not what we're used to hearing: that God could care about women like that and that His shalom is manifested just as much in a reconstructed clitoris (I bet you never thought you'd hear the words "God" and "clitoris" in the same sentence either) as it is in a bowl of food given to a hungry child. But maybe that's because we have limited Him. Thankfully, He hasn't limited Himself. We just, like Lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, have to say the spell that makes invisible things visible, so that our eyes are open to see that wherever there is restoration, there also is He.