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TO DAMIEN:
You have quite a knack for writing, you know. You make my Quixotic quest out here sound like a pitched battle against the twin evils of hardship and complacence. Should my life ever be worthy of novelization, I think you should be the writer of the narrative. Not three minutes hence, I at last finished The Silmarillion. It took being in Mongolia to get me through the whole "A son of B, slayer of C, betrothed to D" aspect. After the first third, it really picked up some momentum, and as with any good book, I had a tear in my eye not only for the beauty of the final prose, but because I feel like I'm leaving a friend who can craft fine fantasies by the side of the road as I ramble on. I'm still riding the euphoria of the epilogue, as I term it. I'm listening to "Into the West" from the Return of the King soundtrack.
I can confess to you that most of this seeking for self-actualization that I do out here really is a Joseph Campbellian search for a hero's journey. I've come to some realizations about the nature of such in this regard. I'm going to start typing and copying and pasting, and see where it leads me...
I've had a lot of time to think about this topic in Mongolia. All through high school and college, there was always a sense of preparing to set out and become the person that I wanted to be. That luxury is now behind me, and the realization that it's as much now the time to start self-actualizing as ever can be utterly paralyzing. The only way that I've been able to get out of bed in the morning is to take things one day at a time. Life in Choibalsan is tough, there's no doubt about it. Yet I firmly believe that I am becoming a stronger person with every day that I stay here.
The thought of turning back, as so many of my peers have done, seems inconceivable. I'm pretty sure that there is no coming back. I think at least once a day about how nice the luxuries, comforts, and particularly companionship of home would be. But if the opportunity or even the necessity arose, they would have to drag me onto that evacuation helicopter kicking and screaming. I'd apply the next day for something to keep myself on the hard road.
I've realized that when I complete my two years of service, I will have finished A hero's journey. Not THE hero's journey. That's what I've had to come to terms with. Life is not a book with some happy ending where time stops before things change and people die. But it is (if you choose to put yourself in the right places) a series of endeavors that make you stronger after each trial and tribulation. Every time you finish, you're ready to undertake something much more harrowing. The fact is, you can't go straight from the Shire to Mordor. But if you make it through the Barrow-downs, Tom Bombadill's wood, Bree, Moria, etc., you're ready for it by the time that you make it to the Dark Gate. I've spent way too much of my life thinking that I will have accomplished something amazing by the time I'm 25. That happens in mathematics and sports. Not in my field. Instead, I'm trying to keep myself as healthy as the food and climate here allow, and to develop my capacities.
What I'm focusing on here is getting REALLY GOOD at what I need to be doing. I'm trying to excel this job's pants off. I pour myself into lesson planning, and make myself available for socialization with host country nationals for a portion of the day that some would consider to be unhealthy. I do this because I want to beat the curve, and suck as much out of this amazing adventure as I can. When I've got a few months left here, and am deciding between going straight to the Foreign Service or graduate school with aims towards USAID or professorship, I want to have really lived Peace Corps Mongolia. I probably spend an hour a day doing precisely the opposite of that. I find myself taking refuge in my apartment and trying to live as close a facsimile of American life as is possible. I am okay with doing so, but only to the degree that is necessary for me to keep my sanity, and maintain my ability to spend the rest of each day working on developing not just the capacities of my students and counterparts, but myself as well. Otherwise, the paralysis extends beyond the 15 minutes after I wake up.
Today, like most days, I walked home literally into the sunset, with a swarm of laughing children surrounding me and walking me to my front door. We call them the "hello monsters," because they enjoy nothing more than to say "hello" at you every thirty seconds. Occasionally they range up into "goodbye" and "my name is..." territory, but seldom far beyond that. In any case, I was exhausted from working for 9 hours and yet, had a ridiculous grin on my face. I realized that it's after I've spent the day helping people-to the best of my ability and no further-that I'm happiest. It's when I feel overwhelmed, particularly when I wake up in Mongolia each day, that I'm the most disconsolate. I'm pretty sure that if I were the center negotiator on climate change talks or nuclear disarmament accords as the person I am now, I'd be pretty miserable for lack of ability.
As much as she's one of the best influences I've ever had, Mrs. Eagle broke us, somehow. She taught me to see every book I read, every action movie I see as male mental masturbation to the idea of a call to adventure and the ability to fulfill it. And yet, I love it. I bury myself in it. A quote from Snow Crash, one of my new favorite books:
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. 'If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being a badass.'"
So true. Maybe the thirteen-year-old in me never grew up. Or maybe a lot of people have this neurosis, I'm not sure. In any case, I've spent a hell of a lot of my life waiting for a call to adventure. But I've had to come to terms with the fact that my family, friends, or loved ones are not going to be murdered by some spectacularly mustachioed villain. Some wizardly old role model is not going to appear and reinvent me in some convenient and catchily-scored montage. We see self-actualization as this 2 minute series of clips of somebody trying to lift a weight and being unable, only 5 cuts later to be pulling a truck through the snow with nothing but their pecs, a big metal chain, and some tremendous testicular fortitude.
You don't get conveniently reinvented. You reinvent yourself, and to do that you need to get out of your box. In my case, the necessity was to put myself in a situation of relative hardship, where I could not only come to better appreciate the ridiculous comforts that my American lifestyle affords me, but also to be somehow reforged into someone a little stronger.
I've also given up on having a bird fly up to my window with some entreaty for aid strapped to its leg. I've had to find my clarion call. Aid and Development is the closest thing to a moral crusade that I'm going to get. And it's not a bad one. Hell, it's the biggest one. I'm unhappy with the lot of the Developing World in that they were dealt unfairly hard hands in life, and I'm unhappy with our lot in that we don't have any easy way to fulfill our desire to improve life. All the hard work has been done for us where our own well-being is concerned.
A major mistake-one that I've been desperately trying to avoid-is getting out here and somehow seeing myself as the "chosen one." I've learned that in nothing is predestined, particularly greatness. You may be smart and you may have lofty goals, but it takes DECADES of self-investment to turn yourself into a "hero" who saves lives, stops wars, or builds a better world. I'm pretty sure that within the somewhat narrower scope of reality, that's what I want to accomplish. Here's my last paragraph of the aspiration statement I had to send in when I got my invitation:
I hoped to be invited to Mongolia starting the moment I was nominated to Asia. It was my opinion that in Mongolia I could help people who were in the most need among the Asian countries in which Peace Corps operates. As far as my personal goals are concerned, I hope that the relatively Spartan nature of Mongolian living will enable me to appreciate the blessings in my life all the more for the severity of their absence. I have loved Asia throughout my life, and I anticipate that the beautiful terrain and rich culture will further heighten my admiration for the starker places in the world and those that inhabit them. I also wish to prove to myself that I will succeed in a lifelong career of international service and ideally, humanitarian aid. I believe that only by having been in the trenches (i.e. the classrooms) of the twin causes of global development and integration could I ever wield the proper wisdom or authority to direct such crucial and yet intractable endeavors.
Here's a paragraph from another e-mail I wrote:
What I need to work on is enjoying the ride there. I've lived my whole life imagining this perfect self that I want to be, ready to set out on page one. I'm learning that I'll be halfway through the book before I feel I'm ready for much of anything. I think in the interim I need to keep my mind set on ambitious yet barely-achievable goals, and end each year as different from and as better than the person as whom I began it. Keep riding the edge of the envelope, and learn to be happy there. At some point, even if you succeed, it's world peace, but for how long? Forever? See progress in how far you've come, not how much you've whittled down the way to go. There's always going to be farther to go, until the world ends. And if we ride hard enough, that's not the sort of thing that we hope will come about for absolution, for the comfort or release of being finished. That's going to be precisely the sort of thing we're trying to prevent, raging to make the world as good as we can for as long as we can, and becoming more capable of doing so with each passing day. Right?
Well, there are my thoughts, and pretty much where I am in life. Thanks for being an understanding brain connected to an empathetic ear. I guess it was as much for me to figure out as for you to read; it was extremely cathartic. I'm exhausted; I stayed up way too late writing this, so I'm sure that my paragraph order is all wrong and there are logical fallacies and typos abounding. I'm gonna head to bed and get ready for the wonderful experience of teaching 4th graders tomorrow morning. The plus side: every day, I get to eat lunch in a Mongolian public elementary school's cafeteria. Seldom can one experience grin-inducing cultural dislocation quite like that.
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