When you are in a new place, a maps most useful trait is that it can help you get lost. You take the trails that are not marked on the map. That is the best thing about having a map in hand. It's the realization that the destination no longer holds court. On a whim, choosing a new direction; allowing yourself to freely wander the world: that gives you strength. After all, real daring comes from a place within and is nursed afterward, by a more appealing thing: fear.
Recently, a friend who is working with me out here, and who also happens to be going back home to Lebanon on Thursday, told me that she wished this could last forever: us, working at the hospital, living in Cambodia. But I told her, "nothing lasts forever." And the minute something threatens to, it becomes instantly annoying to the spirit. We are people who thrive off of temporary excitements, short adventures. After all, no one ever said that value was measured by a yardstick. Who's to say that something lasting a short time has less value than something that seemingly lasts forever? "Don't think about Thursday," I said. "Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Stop measuring time. Start living it." (Easy for me to say, not so easy for me to do.)
Even our friendships are temporary...the idea of strangers coming together during travel...it screams of temporary. But does that mean that our time together was meaningless? I have found that it is only when you travel alone that you are free to let yourself float along whatever stream you encounter. And meeting people along the way is a much different thing than taking them with you from the beginning. Meeting people along the way also requires something of yourself - something that I've become terrible at....revealing yourself. It's funny because you don't have the time to make someone find their way to you. You have to open yourself up from the start. If you want to have a real relationship while travelling, there can be no hiding. There is no time for that. That has been something that has tested me and taught me the most during the course of this adventure in Cambodia.
"Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into." - Wendell Berry. There is fear waiting around every corner...maybe even danger. But rounding those corners makes you brave. And, frankly, not rounding those corners is a refusal to live. Every adventure we take, every fear we stare down, only readies us for the greatest Unknown that waits for each of us. And we will walk that journey alone as well. The way I look at it, I am readying myself for something larger, something that I would like to drain myself of fearing. Why be afraid of it? It waits for all of us the same. In that way, we are, again, unified in our separation from each other.
I said, a few days ago, in an email to a friend...or maybe it was on this blog....that I had never felt more awake than I have felt since being here (and also have never been so satisfyingly exhausted). I guess there is a time in one's life when you are fully awake rather than half-asleep (E.B. White). That time, for me, is now.
