Ego

The city has been a delight to live in for the past month and a half. A good chunk of the population took off for the beach, not to return until March. The effect was like replacing the screw down lid of a pressure cooker with a normal one. The city is still stressful, but the teeth grinding intensity of before more or less evaporated with the heat. There are less cars and taxis, less stress, less trash, less noise, less pollution, and thankfully less Porteno mentality.

With the summer, people have loosened up a little. They're talking to each other, smiling occasionally, treating each other maybe normal instead of with contempt. And so I've thoroughly enjoyed el verano en la ciudad. Swimming, eating out at my favorite parilla, going to museums and street fairs on the weekends, watching movies, sitting out late at night at cafes on the street. I'm still working a bit, teaching English and reading a few times a week, but the work is nothing stressful. Life is really good....Depending on how you look at it.

When you come to a new country, you often give things up: Your title, your career, your educational achievements, your established personality, your material posessions. I'm not a school psychologist here (I don't even work legally). My Spanish works but I don't come off sounding very learned or intelligent. I sold my car and most of my material possessions and have not replaced them. I have no established personality or reputation nor any recognizable signals to people that I have value.

I came to this realization during a conversation with my friend Cecilia. She asked me why I hadn't dated much or tried dating while I've been down here. I hadn't really considered it until she asked me. But I think my response was accurate. I said, 'Creo que no tengo mucha confianza aca. No tengo mi titulo. No tengo mi idioma. No tengo cosas. No tengo mi carera. No tengo familia. En EEUU la gente me da importancia porque soy un psicologo. Aca, no. Aca, Soy Pat.' Translation: I don't have as much confidence here. I don't have my title, my language, my stuff, my career, my family. In the United States, people gave me a degree of respect automatically because I'm a school psychologist. Here, I'm Pat.

So that's a bit dramatic, but it's true. A lot of what I worked for and built up to in my life was stripped away upon coming here. It's just me again and few of the protections, comforts, and ego of before.

Once again, I have to earn respect, confidence, trust, love. In the United States it was easy and I had grown lazy, allowing my achievements and reputation to replace my everyday actions. Here I haven't had that option.

The result is that I act much differently here than in the US. I am more consistently kind and generous. For instance, I cook for my friends almost every time we get together. I think I want to show them that I do in fact have some value, that there are reasons to respect me despite the fact that I don't sound very intelligent in Spanish, despite the fact that I don't have a respectable or stable career here. I also have to earn trust. For all the people of Buenos Aires know, I could be lying about who I was in the US. Everything I say could be made up. So, I have to actually BE the person that I claim I was in the United States instead of just giving people my card.

Absolute honesty has become very important. I make it a point to be as honest as possible with people in terms of money, details, information, or even stories I tell. I also take more time here to listen to people and to try to help out emotionally.

Being stripped of my ego was not something I consciously prepared for or realized that I would have to encounter upon moving down here. But I think I wanted it.

Things in the U.S. had become a bit too easy, too comfortable, boring. I wanted a bit of adventure and to be tested again, to be forced to learn quickly, to be renewed. But I also wanted to get rid of almost everything and see what would happen. I had been drifting in this direction throughout my stay in Columbus. Each year I moved to a cheaper and smaller apartment and got rid of more material possessions. In my last few months I was living in the tiny office of a friend before moving to Buenos Aires. I had also been learning survival skills, like how to start a fire with a bow or hand drill. And I'd been reading survival novels like Robinson Crusoe and Life of Pi. I had the primitive basic human yearning to connect again with basic caveman type stuff-survival.

What better way to do this than by moving to a developing country without first having a job, place to live, health insurance, family, or language. This experience I think is what I'd been building up to. I wanted to know what it was like to live very basically, stripped of both physical and symbolic ego.

So now that I've been here for almost 8 months straight, 11 months total, how do I feel? In a word, liberated. I feel more free than I have since I was an undergrad. I am more healthy, centered, and focused. I see the world much more clearly again. I feel as though I can give to people again, that I don't need to take and instead am stable enough (during communication) to not project my needs, problems, ambitions.

I think I know now too what it means to be content. I'm not sure I'm happy. I've always been a bit wary of happiness, never quite trusted it. It seems too fleating and ephemeral. But contentedness I can accept. I've realized that material posessions and the protections of money and status and education.....They alone don't result in contentedness. In fact, having given much of that up for the better part of a year, I am much more content. I've been forced to come alive again, to be all of my accumulated education, knowledge, wisdom, life experience. And with being forced back into an intense live-in-the-moment reality has come health, focus, clarity.

I've learned too that life doesn't have to be work. The first thing I did when I came down here was to throw myself into 4 jobs. Working a ton has always given me a sense of comfort. Ever since I started my first paper route when I was 10 I can remember the sense of comfort it gave me to have my little aluminum fort knox piggy bank stuffed with money. Since that point, my life has been defined mostly by my work. Or, at least, I only felt comfortable when I had consistent work.

Now, I have less work than ever and after the initial freak out of 'what do I do with myself and how do I make meaning without work?', I have settled into a routine of making meaning out of things like pleasure seeking, living in the moment, and personal development. I visit museums, eat out, spend time with friends, experiment with cooking, swim, write, read, concentrate on being a good friend and family member. The lesson: Life can be pretty darn good without work. I'm really starting to enjoy it.

Sure, lots of people don't have this option. They have families and responsibilities etc. Yes, it's easy for me to say, I have just myself to worry about. That's true, but I think there are a lot of people out there who could work less. I think we work so much and don't do what we really want to because we're afraid (I also think a lot of people have no idea what they really want to do or have never taken the time to sincerely consider it). We're afraid, as I was, of facing a life without work. What do I do? What will my life mean? We're also frightened by a society that tells us we need all kinds of stuff we don't need. How do we get this stuff? We must work work work and the worst thing we could do is to not have work or to lose our jobs. I also think we're afraid of not having comforts and protections like life insurance, cars, car insurance, prescription drugs, extravagant foods, big homes, nice well kempt yards, security systems. What would life be like without security, comfort, and stuff? My experience after having experienced both ways of life (stuff and ego versus less stuff and less ego) has lead me to the conclusion that I overwhelmingly prefer the latter to the former.

So why am I coming back you might ask? If I'm so zen here, if things are so good with my new bohemian lifestyle, what is it that's tugging me back to the U.S. Why don't I stay down here and continue to live out what has turned out to be a very satisfying life?

Sometimes I ask myself this when I'm enjoying a beautiful 5 dollar porterhouse steak at my favorite restaurant while reading The New Yorker. I do fear coming back to the United States. I don't want to get caught up in the race to accumulate stuff, work too much, get stressed out, sick, and addicted to prescription medication. I'd like to continue this healthy lifestyle. However, I also feel a need to be with my family, to give something substantial to the world, and to start a business of some sort. These things I find very difficult to do here and I think I will need them for long term contentedness.

I think I will also need, however, to get away from the United States occasionally. I will need every now and then to take a summer or maybe even another year to give up the things that I've accumulated so that I can recenter again.

So I need a plan for when I return to the United States, to live what I've learned about life here. I've got to foresee the pressures that I'm likely to encounter and figure out a way to live life there to some degree how I've lived it here. More than anything else, I need to understand that doing what I want to do is more important than making money. And maybe in the end if I'm happy doing what I'm doing, I'll wind up making more money anyway. I think sometimes the world works that way.

In the meantime, I'm already missing Argentina. For the first 6 months or so here, I was ready for the experience to be done, to go home. Now I'm not exactly looking forward to leaving. 3571 Paraguay 7B has become home.

Then again, the masses haven't returned to the city yet. When they do, I'm almost sure that I'll want out again. That said, I am predicting that my attitude and preparedness to leave Argentina will change by mid March, 2 or so weeks after school starts and everyone returns from vacation.