Reality and its shortcomings (a.k.a. The End)

Well, so, I guess we're done.... As Ashifa said, it's kind of sad to stop blogging. She is even thinking about starting her own blog in the near future. We'll post a link here in a few weeks if she does. Otherwise... The End.

A few thoughts on our return to reality (or maybe where we were before was reality and we're in some other place now):

The first few days at home were a bit overwhelming as we adjusted from living out of a backpack for four months to managing a household again! Once I returned to the house, I remembered that we left parts of it in significant disarray upon both of our departures, in December and in March, and that it now needed to be arrayed again. That's what unplanned travel and procrastination will get you! So there was a lot of cleaning and organizing. And the realization that, despite thinking we're sort of minimalists, we really have a lot of stuff. No one really needs that much stuff.

No major culture shock, but a few things did cross my mind. My first day back in Toronto, seeing kids walking down the street with their carefully crafted images (clothes, hair, tattoos, tudes), adults walking down the street with their carefully crafted images (Lululemon, faux-hawks), Oprah and Dr. Phil and a thouand self-help/self-perfection books, hearing an interview on the radio with a woman who's written a book on what her job at Sea World training Shamu has taught her about people..... We in North America spend so much time and energy just thinking about how to be. I mean, there's a little bit of that everywhere, I guess. No, wait, I don't think that's true. I think we saw thousands of people on our trip who couldn't give a shit about optimizing their image and personality. Even in the Arctic, you had a little bit of image and attitude - the kids' little faux gang signs, and the sassy Canada Goose parka, and I'm sure there's a hierarchy of cool regarding different types of snowmobiles. But nothing like the effort those of us 'down south' spend on narcissistically thinking about ourselves.

Being back in our advanced civilization also means encountering irritable people, avoiding eye contact with anyone on the street, and never talking to the person standing an inch from you for half an hour on the bus. This is 180° from life in India and I'm pretty sure this is not what civilization is all about.

The other big downer has been work. I'd been trying to come back with a nice zen attitude - "eh, whatever... I am calm... I do not care about these gross inefficiencies... I do not care about mangled management.... I will simply do what I am asked.... Even when it is pointless.... I will be proactive and patient and.... " Hee hee - I am so naive! That lasted approximately one day. What I found was that, the inefficiencies have become grosser and the management more mangled.

After traveling in places that have far fewer or none of the advantages we in North America have - money, education, political stability - you realize how little we do with the much that we have. Despite all these North American advantages, daily at my job in this government (and it's only slightly worse than other places I've worked), I see so much opportunity, money, and resources wasted. Most of those advantages are negated by bad management, lack of political will, and fear. And in our society, it seems that the areas where we do manage to summon all our forces and our money, energy, and efficiency are for pointless things - The Bachelor, $80 yoga pants, deep-fried Twinkies, $10 million baseball players, Hummers, this year's fashion in lawn furniture.... And meanwhile, we haven't figured out how to make buses run on time, or how to quit getting high blood pressure, or that cars and leaf blowers do bad things to the air, or that our economy will tank if we're depending on Wal-mart to provide jobs when people are studying computers in places in India where people still crap in the street. I don't know.... maybe if we gave Laos or India all our 'advantages' and a couple hundred years to figure out what to do with them, they'd end up the same place we have.

[And, by the way, I am not being holier than thou. I read less-than-necessary books too, including some nearly as ridiculous as how Shamu can make me a better person. And despite Ashifa and I trying to be rationally eco-friendly (as opposed to trendily eco-friendly) the tons of greenhouse gases poured into the atmosphere by the planes we've flown on to learn all these lessons probably out-tons by far the amount created by all our car-driving readers in the last year.]

Anyway.... all is not doom and gloom in our world. It was an incredible trip and we are certainly better people for having made it. You can read all the books you want, but you can't really begin to understand other places and other people until you've expended the greenhouse gases to go there. The trip was humbling and frustrating, but also inspiring. No matter what the circumstances, or the 'disadvantages', people have, they find a way to live and thrive. I think that was my main lesson from the trip, and probably one a lot of us need to learn - there are lots of ways to organize life - in a village or a country or a culture or a political system. No one way is better than any other way - they're just different. People make things work their own way. We can learn something from others, but we'll all find a way.

I was just looking through the little notebook I had on the trip where I would sometimes jot 'blog notes' and it makes me remember all the amazing things we saw and learned. We've barely scratched the surface in this blog. We never talked about the smell of India (diesel fumes + coal fires + fresh cow poo + burning cow poo), or the greatest lesson of all - the co-existence of a billion Indians (or a thousand on the street in a single block sometimes) with general peace and lack of irritation and anger, the amazing contrasts between rich and poor in India, tactics for using a squat toilet, how unique our North American rigidity, rules, and liability-phobia are (even Italy was so much more laid-back), how nice it was to get back to a much less male-centered culture, my shocking statement "this gobi [cauliflower] is delicious", the surrealness of eating tandoori prawns and mutton in a pub while watching cricket and listening to an Indian rock band playing "Play That Funky Music, White Boy", that there was almost nowhere in India or Laos where people weren't helpful, listening to teenage Indian girls play Taboo in perfect English and understanding all the American cultural references, and things I saw from bus windows - men butchering a cow, a man and woman weaving on a giant loom, cows in a rice paddy, cows in a cemetery, a boy lassoing a cow, eight guys raising a telephone pole with a rope..... Incredible!

So, we're done. Thanks so much to all of our regular visitors and to those who occasionally popped in to read our long-winded spouting. We really enjoyed being able to share the trip with you. It was nice to know there were people back home following along. It was a great trip and I encourage everyone to try to exit your comfort zone at least once and travel somewhere very different than where you live. It's not as hard as you think. English is the unofficial language of world travel, so you're already good there. It's not really as scary as you think. I never felt scared for my safety once on the whole trip (well, except for the driving in India). Nothing bad will happen to you that couldn't happen to you at home or in Orlando (125 people die in North America every day in traffic accidents). If you are certain that something bad is going to happen to you, quit watching the news so much. Travel will teach you a lot about yourself and about other people. You may feel a little uncomfortable, but sometimes that's a good thing.