A Dialogue Across the Pacific

Writing from the road in Hong Kong, Liz has posted a response to my “What’s Going On?” post on her blog. It’s an elegant and moving meditation on her own life’s journey and her ambivalence about home and the road. Reading it I feel like I’m in a cafe or diner that is well-known to me: that sense of between, settled but not home, on the road and imagining home, wanderlust, curiosity, fear, excitement, longing. She articulates it so well that I want to comment on some of the many insights she makes.

“I have lived my entire life waiting for the ‘what’s next’ that comes with being a student.”

There are no doubt other vocations that lend themselves to these passages from one thing to another, but being a student is a unique way to organize your life. First of all, you get to frame your journey as a vocational objective for those who may not understand or appreciate what you are doing. Saying it’s about school means you get something of a pass, though if you’re studying religion or the other humanities, you can expect some more questions, like “What are you going to do with that?” Here you have the option of doing the vocational dance or being more ambiguous. The first will end the conversation; the second will extend it into places you may not want to go. The vocational dance response would sound something like this: “Well, actually, a degree in the humanities provides much-needed skills for working in the twenty-first century global economy: analysis, interpretation, communication, and adaptability.” In addition to being true, the vocational dance will tell your listener that you’ve thought about what you’re doing and have some rationale for it–even if you haven’t and you don’t. Ambiguity, on the other hand, typically means that you’re going to get more questions. Saying things like “Well, I’m just not through learning” is likely to get you more inquiries and perhaps even a lecture, especially if you are younger and female. I’ve found that using an apt quotation is a wonderful response to questions about “what’s next” for a student. Give your interlocutor Whitman or Lao Tzu or Jackson Browne, and you’ve done two things: you’ve directed the conversation to more literary or philosophical spaces, and you’ve issued an invitation for deeper and more meaningful dialogue. Fellow travelers will engage; those who are just making conversation will not.

But there’s something more to that “what’s next” of being a student: it really is a journey, perhaps the oldest one we know. It is a journey with knowledge or–if you’re really lucky–wisdom at the end. And I don’t just mean the content knowledge of the discipline you are studying; I mean the knowledge of the journey itself, the wisdom that comes from venturing away from home. The etymological roots of the word education imply that there is a journey involved, a movement from one place to another, so the “what’s next” for a student has implications in all kinds of realms from the vocational to the sacred.

“But even there, in the joy of learning, it wasn’t long before I began longing for more than papers and books, and desired real-life experiences. I wanted to be on the other side of the book – I wanted people to read my stories – and knew that wouldn’t happen while I was still in school.”

I’ll let Walt respond to this one.

Now I reëxamine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to move somewhere not knowing how long I’ll be there. Or even the possibility of never leaving that place. What does that feel like?”

That last question is the one that makes wanderers be up and gone. It’s not that others who have the gift of being home don’t ask that question. It’s that for those afflicted with wanderlust, it’s not enough to ask. We have to find out. Of course we don’t explore every possibility that presents itself to our imagination, but we do have to explore some of them. We live, then, with this constant sense of otherness. On the road we wonder what home would be like; at home we long for the road. From certain psychological perspectives, it’s a recipe for unhappiness. But being a wanderer isn’t so much about being happy; rather, it’s about encountering divine things. Walt again:

Allons! whoever you are, come travel with me!

Traveling with me, you find what never tires.

The earth never tires;
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first—Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first;
Be not discouraged—keep on—there are divine things, well envelop’d;
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Walt intimates something else important here: the idea of tirelessness. If there was a single adjective that describes contemporary Americans, it might well be tired. We are tired from work, then we’re tired from being off work, and we’re tired of being tired. In the realm of the sacred, I would say that our exhaustion symbolizes our depletion of meaningful myths and rituals to live by. I don’t want to be the conservative romantic here and reflect back to a golden age when we had meaningful myths and rituals; I doubt we ever did. But that doesn’t really matter because we don’t have them now. As I think about the times I have been exhausted, they almost always have to do with following a script that is alien to me, one that I know at some level doesn’t work, but I keep playing my role as if it does. Alienation is the stuff of our lives, but there is alienation that makes us tired because we know better and alienation that makes us energized because we want to know more. If it’s fair to call Liz’s ambiguity and ambivalence alienation as well, then hers is the latter.

“But the thought, the very idea of living in one place without an end date, it absolutely baffles me. At the same time, I find myself beginning to CRAVE that. Long for it. Imagine what it would be like. And I wonder, will I ever find out?”

What a lovely ending to a lovely post. A prayer of longing, of desire, of home. But it is also a prayer of the road because it is a prayer of the imagination, of possibility, of openness and uncertainty. Will you ever find out, my friend? I think you will because you have imagined it.

“We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves… The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.” ~N. Scott Momaday