The Question Part Deux

So my brother Kevin might be more sad about me leaving Buenos Aires than I am. For him, it's cool to have a brother living in Argentina, just as it's cool for me to have him living in Stockholm, Sweden (not to mention the fact that he's about to publish his first book and has already attracted an impressive following).

So why am I not sad about leaving?

I suppose that although I'm not sad, I'm really not sure what to feel at this point. All I know is that the big city is not really for me. As I've said over and over again, I like Buenos Aires in January and February when everyone is gone. The rest of the year it's stressful, with occasional holiday respites.

I know that I will miss what the city has taught me. For the first time in my life, I haven't modelled myself or my actions from anyone else. In Buenos Aires, I started a new life and had to rely on myself to build my personality anew. In doing so, I realized the shortcomings in my previous role models, or at least that they weren't perfect. I also realized that I don't have to be perfect, that self development isn't always about moving in the direction of a perfect self, but instead about coming to know oneself(or maybe soul) better and fitting your life to your true self. That is, for most of my life I think I've been trying to fit two size too big Nike Air Jordans to my feet when really what I've always needed was an obscure and cheap pair of Saucony Jazz's with Doctor Scholl's insoles.

Back to the idea of my newish self... Buenos Aires has helped me to be more confident in almost all respects, with the exception of talking to women (I digress). I'm not sure if this confidence comes from knowing myself better, or that I haven't looked to a model for guidance, or if I take life and people less seriously, or if I have a bigger picture perspective, or if I feel more empowered because of what I've done here and therefore am not intimidated easily, or if I've learned to be more assertive and confident after living in the big city. Who knows.

So my point in stating the above is that I like what this experience has done for me, even if I haven't always liked the experience. It has been a challenge, exciting, nothing if not an adventure. And while I may not feel sad right now, I am worried that I will lose what this experience has provided. I'm afraid I'll lose the empowered part of my personality that allows me to tell people what I'm honestly thinking and feeling as opposed to telling them what I think they will want to hear or providing the response that will result in the least conflict. Ok, granted, sometimes you can't always do that, but I think you ought to be able to say what you really think the majority of the time and save the white lies or untruths or pleasantries (whatever you want to call them) for when they are more or less absolutely necessary. I think we lose ourselves when we don't tell people what we're honestly thinking and feeling. We become a reflection of what other people want instead of a projection of who we are.

So I'm afraid I'll lose this aspect of myself. In truth, I'm not sure I like this aspect of myself. It certainly results in more conflict and less kind feelings towards me and less opportunities for friendship. What it does, however, is bring me closer to me. It also, I suppose, brings me closer to people with whom I genuinely connect instead of those who are attracted to their own reflection or my generally passive and non-combative nature.

Ademas, I'm afraid that when I go back to the States I'll miss the instability, challenge, and adventure of this life. My apartment here is like a nice canvas tent. My bed is a glorified cot. I haven't figured out how to turn on my wall heater (Update 5/15/09 success! I'm not a total idiot). The oven is on its last legs. And my furniture is a 2 on a scale of 1-10 in terms of comfort. The effect is that it makes my life more simple. It also doesn't allow me to get too comfortable. It keeps me on edge, moving, thinking, getting out into the city, working at my computer instead of watching an endless stream of movies I've already seen.

Being here also is an adventure in terms of my perpetually changing job situation. I've had all kinds of experiences here. Jobs I would never have had in the US. For instance, I recently fell into teaching Spanish to the former ambassador to the UN from Columbia. So cool. And I didn't even try for it. It simply came by way of a recommendation from another job. At this rate, if I stay here next year I have no idea what might come my way. In the United States, I know more or less exactly what I'll be doing day in and day out, 8-9 hours a day at least. Here, I work nowhere near that many hours, but still get by without breaking into savings. Essentially, my job and life are unstable in BA, different every day of the week and changing in shape almost every month, usually a combination of giving tours, teaching English, preparing a student for kindergarten, teaching English, History, and Science to Elementary Grade students from the U.S. I'm never quite sure what I'll be doing the following month and I'm never too busy, but somehow if I do a respectable job with whatever I'm doing, I garner enough recommendations to find another job and always have my needs and many wants met.

In the US, on the other hand, I typically worry about keeping my job, making ends meet etc. Even though I earn enough to support a family of 4. I guess my ease of mind here has to do with the fact that I won't be here long term. I'm not a legal employee, I have no state retirement, I have no job secured health insurance. I'm more or less on a year long adventure hoping nothing crazy happens, that I make it through ok so that I can jump back into the comfort of my old life with new skills and without too many scars. How would I feel if I were here long term? Would I handle it differently? Would I be more stressed?

I think I would almost certainly change my life if I were going to be here long term. But I'm not quite sure why. I'm healthier than I've been in years, emotionally and in some ways physically. I have good cheap health insurance. My standard of living is high not because I have lots of stuff, but instead because I don't work much and have the money to travel on occasion and eat pretty much whatever I want. My jobs are fun, varied, and fulfilling. My mind is active. My personal development has been rapid and illuminating. The only unfortunate and, for me, unsustainable part of my life here is the big, dirty, crowded, mean city. If I continued to live here, I would move to a less crowded city where it is easier to get away to nature on the weekends and where the people are friendlier, like Cordoba. The other issue here is my lack of a partner. I have some good, loyal, fantastic friends in Buenos Aires, but haven't found a right woman yet. Which is not to say that I couldn't find one in Buenos Aires. It's just that it's not easy in the big city and I stink at it in Spanish. It took long enough for me to talk to women in English. Learning to do it in Spanish has, errr, not been successful. Add to that the different culture of dating as well as different rules for engagement and I am, well, useless.

So I have my little year and some months adventure down here and I jump back to the US with a good stable job in hand and I return to being a comfortable and fearful wimp who hunkers down on his soft leather couch and watches movies on the weekends and fills the week with the drudgery of work, gym, and a little tv before bed. Great.

If I return to the above, I'll surely miss BA. I'll most definitely be sad that I left. I'll feel that I left my life in Buenos Aires and returned to a coma-like cocoon. Maybe I'll spend the rest of my life doing what you're supposed to do: Buying a house, preparing for retirement, staying in shape, eating right, taking preventitive measures against age-related diseases. Life could easily pass this way, without stopping to look around more, doing what I'm supposed to do.

And if I don't want to stagnate? If I don't want to jump back into comfort? How do I do that? The answer is... I'm not entirely sure. I worry or think anyway that I may have to get away every now and then, like I'm doing now, to be sure that I maintain my current frame of mind. If I find myself stepping into old habitos, maybe I'll plan a summer trip to a new Spanish speaking country. Or maybe I'll take a year and go off to some place like China or Vietnam. But can I continue to develop without plopping myself into stressful and challenging places? Can I maintain my form of being and learn even more about myself, continue to connect with me while I'm stationed in one non-overtly challenging place?

What I can say is that I'm going to try. And to some degree, I think there's no going back. I think there are some components to myself that, now that I have uncovered them from the junk that had been obscuring them, I can never deny again.

I wound up taking a job as a bilingual school psychologist in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb just to the East of Denver. I took a job that does not pay as well as others. However, the job is as a full-time bilingual psych working primarily with Hispanic students and their parents and teachers. I wanted this experience so that I could build off of my time in Buenos Aires and to further improve my Spanish in a functional way. In addition, the school district in which I chose to work is extremely diverse and has a very large Hispanic population. If all goes as planned, it will be something between living in the US and another country, an intermediary step on my way home from Buenos Aires, working in Spanish all day but living in English.

I've also chosen a part of the country with which I'm unfamiliar. I've spent limited time in Colorado and the West, but from what I've seen it's beautiful country and in proximity to all sorts of amazing state and national parks. In addition, there is a strong alternative spiritual community in Colorado as well as a focus on the environment, with bike paths on all major roads as well as clean air and water.

But none of this answers the question of what I will specifically do to continue to develop, to continue to learn more about me. I will likely need to take at least a few concrete steps to ensure that this process continues. The following are ideas:

1. Continue the blog. The blog will likely become more boring and might suffer even less readership, but so long as I'm learning and articulating and reflecting and developing, I suppose that's all that's really important.

2. Continue to pay close attention to self. I learn about myself when I have the patience and state of mind to take note of details. For instance, I learned in BA that in the Spring and Summer, I become argumentative, ornery, and impatient. I often separate from my mild mannered friends, temporarily severing relationships until the fall when I settle down and am more patient, peace loving, and focused on compromise. It took me over 29 years to articulate this. I'm hoping that with more attention to myself, other discoveries won't take nearly as long. I also hope that I meet other perceptive people so they can give me feedback or point out things about me that I haven't been able to see. For example, I recently reunited with a great old friend who I openly asked to help me with providing feedback and career counseling based on what he knows about me. It was refreshing to have the perspective of such an intelligent and perceptive friend who more or less selflessly had my best interests in mind.

3. Learn what's important to me. I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any specific God. I simply wasn't provided the tools to do so. That leaves me with uncertainty about my existence. Maybe I'm here for a reason, maybe not. So what gets me out of bed every morning? If not the hanging fruit of afterlife or the desire to please God, then what? This is something I'm going to have to figure out as I learn more about me and the way I interact with the world. I've identified recently that I really like to help people. I like to see them smile. I like when they are grateful. I like when I do something for them that maybe someone else couldn't. I especially like connecting with people through words. I like helping them talk through psychological and philosophical difficulties or conflicts or just ideas in general. I think that, for whatever reason, it was something I may have been made for. I feel as though I am connecting with harmony when I connect with people on a deep level through words. I feel the same when I help people work, talk through, and articulate psychological issues. It's a sense that maybe suggests that I have found my place in the world, as if my true self has been temporarily fit into the universal puzzle.


4. Make more deliberate decisions to reflect what's important. So once I decide what's important to me, if that ever happens, I'm going to try to make better decisions to complement my meaning. I spend an inordinate amount of time reading the news on the internet every day. I would say 80% of this time is wasted. Granted, I do learn some important stuff and I can't say it's not enjoyable and it is spontaneous. But, it doesn't give me the sense of fulfillment that doing good work or writing a chapter of a book or writing a solid blog entry does. I also want to begin to make sure that my money is spent on stuff that directly reflects what's important to me. I swam for 6 months, 4-5 times per week in an oversized bathing suit that fell off my butt after every lap. I refused to buy another while I spent money frivolously on stuff that wasn't nearly as important to my health or happiness. I felt ridiculous when I finally realized this, that swimming was a priority in my life but I had not supported it at all financially, with the exception of my gym membership. Along those same lines, during my recent interviews and travels, I've become acquainted with the YMCA system in the US. It turns out that the Y is much nicer than I had imagined. And I love the idea of a community coming together to create a center where people can meet and stay fit in a clean and safe place, even if they don't have a ton of money. It's something I've decided that I'd like to support charitably. I think it's one of the first charitable ideas I've come up with myself, as opposed to having people tell me that I should.

5. Relax, maintain perspective, don't let people trick you into taking stuff too seriously. People at my old jobs would get terribly worked up about stuff that just didn't matter all that much. And as much as I would try to avoid the stress, it would infect me too. I've got to find a way to avoid the hysteria and the generally fearful attitude from which I kind of fled when I came down here. If I find myself wrapped up in it, I'm going to have to find a way to mediate or change it. But I can't accept it. Hysteria and stress are toxic.

6. Make connections with like minded people whom you connect with while you are being yourself. I have the bad habit of making friends with people whom I don't really connect with but who become friends with me because I tell them what they want to hear or because I'm non-confrontational. There are times when it's necessary to be non-confrontational and to kiss butt, but NOT when you're looking for a friend or partner with whom you'd like to have a lasting and meaningful relationship.

7. Find and commit to a weekly spiritual reflection of some sort, perhaps aided by other articulate people who are searching out the same. Sure, I could reflect or meditate by myself each week, maybe just by continuing this blog. But it'd be nice to share the experience with other like minded people. Others could also provide motivation, consistency, and structure to ensure that the process of development had as much chance of continuing as possible. Further, it's hard sometimes to notice details about myself. Harder sometimes than noticing things about other people. For this reason, having others to help me learn about myself might be more effective than going it alone.

8. Write more. My method of self expression is without a doubt words. The more I express, the better I do it, the more I learn about myself, and how to articulate what I'm thinking and feeling. Sometimes I have difficulty sitting down for long periods to begin and sustain the writing process. I like to walk and be active and can't concentrate for stretches in front of a computer unless I'm highly motivated to do so. One method I'd like to try in an attempt to write more is to buy a recording device into which I can dictate and then transcribe later. Then, in theory, I can walk through the Colorado Rockies or the Canyons of Utah and capture my thoughts in the process. Later, I can eat a long dessert while I transcribe, correct, and shape as I go.

Any other ideas for helping me to continue my process of self discovery and spiritual development would be much appreciated in the comments section.