I have time

Last time - wow, it has been a long while, hasn’t it - I spoke of fear, a feeling of encroachment, the sense that I was shrinking and reverting to a lesser form of myself. I determined to forge ahead in spite of my uncertainty about what exact path to take, with the hope that simply moving might help me to unearth some useful observations to live by and share with you. Alas, I did not proceed to do much with that fortitude.

However, it is worth it to try again, and to keep on trying again. In my next blog, I will finally return to chronicling my summer trip. I have time for this. I didn’t have time before, but I do now.

No, I don’t believe that. Or, I don’t mean that. “I don’t have time” (or “I do have time”) is a very common Western phrase, and in the last three months I have quietly said it to myself whenever the thought of toiling on this blog - or on travel as a vocation - has crossed my mind. The claim tidily summarizes a slew of feelings, desires, and material conditions but it is also absurdly, almost offensively inaccurate. To say “I didn’t have time” doesn’t really communicate anything at all, except to confirm some very basic data that you could see with your own eyes - that I was not writing for a while.

I mean something entirely apart from what I say, and part of traveling well in life is to understand how what I think or say differs from reality, and why it differs...or to at least know that what I say or think often differs from reality and also influences the shape of reality as I experience it. Further, in the spirit of my “Flip the Pyramid” blog, I want to be respectful of you who are taking time to read. I want to speak, and mean, with care. To get to what I really mean, I need to take you on a side quest.

One thing I have enjoyed in the last several months is a lot of interaction with family and friends that I have not often seen for many years. I like the opportunity to share time with them. I like our conversations, which serve so many functions: delivering information, connecting emotionally, flexing imagination, bringing forth and jointly rearranging messy thoughts, or simply indulging in wordplay. The volatility of interacting with growing children is particularly exhausting and rewarding. I (choose to) enjoy all of these interactions because they constantly whack me over the head with reminders of how messy communication is. They remind me to think twice about what I think and say as I journey through life.

When I am talking to others, but especially when I am talking to myself, I often forget just how wide a divide there is between how I interpret and label experiences, and what those experiences really are, or really could be. I think that when one occupies a particular language, region, social group (especially the social group of “just me”) for long enough, challenges (direct or circumstantial) to the words one assigns to life diminish. The perimeter of personal perception/expression and the rigidity of one’s communication habits turn invisible. The very thought that the experience or meaning of an event differs from person to person becomes incomprehensible.

Now that I am circulating among people I have been mostly apart from for years, a set of mental and verbal habits that contrast (and sometimes overlap) with my own is in play. The contingency of our perspectives, and the subtext of our statements, slowly becomes apparent as I take time to marinate in this new/old environment. I observe shorthand forms to convey affection, ask for favors, signal amusement. I also perceive patterns for backhanded compliments, rage, indignation. Above all I see irony - to which we are all, usually, blind - the occasions when our own words hang us.

Communication is paper and twine that we wrap around space and time to shape how we identify, understand, and engage the world we encounter. It also helps us to shape ourselves (or others). The volume of space allowed by the box, the flexibility of its space varies, and not always according to our wishes. Does this frustrate you? I admit it often frustrates me.

It is not always conscious, but we seem to work to limit the threat of variety that perception and language pose. Sometimes we say that we don’t have time to deal with the complexity, but more often we apply much more powerful justifications to our choices. We discipline and domesticate language, and when it protests we are tempted to shout back, as we might to a child, “because I said so.” In fact, it’s better when we can convince people to behave according to our ideas because real-world submission to our humble thoughts and words gives our ideas a force that they don’t naturally possess.

What does any of this have to do with travel, the stated purpose of this blog, or time, the theme of this post (other than the fact that I have made excessive use of the word “time”)?

Regarding travel: I suggest that our ignorance and vulnerability grow the more routine our lives are, or the more we filter our experiences and conversations to what we can predict and manage. Ignorantly, we forget that language is a tool that, in a dramatic twist, becomes a tyrant the more we use it to exercise control. We do not make certainty, we just disallow uncertainty, but in doing so we imprison our own ability to grow.

Total self-assurance is perilous in a language like English, for example. I’m not even talking about its unruly grammar: regarding vocabulary, speakers must pluck shifty words from a squirming nest of synonyms, then arrange them in ways that either limit or exaggerate their tendency to wrestle with one another, at the same time that every word we choose reminds us of other, half-seen words that aren’t even in the sentence. English is sly like a jester - comparison and double-meaning is how we build thoughts. Unless one is using a special technical vocabulary, expressing a very specific meaning that everyone understands the way you do are small.

But the peril is also the opportunity. When we dare to venture into unfamiliar circumstances, we receive opportunities to confront the assumptions that shape our thoughts and actions. In another country or even in the home down the street of someone with a different lifestyle than ours, the words and ideas we use one way may show up in a different context, serving a very different purpose. When we choose to pass beyond our property line, we start to remember all the other limits we have drawn and forgotten over time.

Perhaps routine risks ignorance, you say, but how on earth does routine make us vulnerable? As our perception and language become defined by a specific set of ideas we stop seeing - or wanting to see - sharp turns and pitfalls in the life journey before us. We may place too much faith in the endurance of our current conditions. But even if our material lives remain perfectly safe, consider the riches of life experience that we miss by spending all our energy on building a protective wall around a small set of comfortable circumstances. We may be vulnerable to losing what we could have enjoyed, not just what we already have.

Regarding time: What we say is about time is, I believe, often really about resources and priorities. First of all, wrestling with uncertainty is hard work. Life deals us so much hard work. It’s understandable that we look for ways to ease our burdens, and it’s even more understandable that work that seems complicated and abstract gets put in a “to do later” pile in order to labor at more immediate concerns, like reducing friction with a coworker who is best friends with your boss just enough to not get fired, but not enough to really know them as a person, or helping elect someone you approximately agree with - never mind the troubles in their position - to defeat someone you absolutely distrust - never mind the positives in their position, or simply earning enough money to pay your expenses (what expenses are necessary and what sort of work would be ideal to participate in are matters for another time).

Devoting time and energy to considering the nuts and bolts of how we experience life may sound wonderful, or it may sound absurd. Walking in the company of someone who thinks completely different about life may strike us as an opportunity to explore existence, or as a rote exercise in something we already know and which doesn’t matter (sure, no one knows everything, but we already know what matters most). Investigating our predispositions could revolutionize our experience of life, or it could just be an enormous waste that robbed us of a chance to catch a movie premiere.

There can be deeper and more damaging reasons for our decision to not have time.

For the last three month (since before my last post), I have struggled with forces I already identified. I worry that I was a bad traveler, that I may have insulted some of my hosts, that my experience in Europe was a flash in the pan, that it was a privileged indulgence. I wonder whether learning one (much less two) new languages is an overzealous pipe dream. Not having time has been shorthand for a cancerous self-loathing that I constantly battle. "I don't deserve to take time."

Furthermore, the longer I am back in America, and especially in the Midwest culture where I grew up, I feel pressure, from within and without, to conform to a life vocabulary and a set of boundaries common to my country. Old instincts arise to get on with real life, where real life means securing an everyday job - just about any everyday job - buying a car, renting an apartment, maybe finding someone to settle down with. "It is not appropriate or moral to take time."

“I don’t have time” is a quintessential American phrase, with its fuzzy words, its subtle implications. It is a sneaky way to say “this doesn’t/shoudn't matter,” “I shouldn’t waste energy on this,” “I don’t care."

What does matter to me? What do I want to spend energy on? What do I care about? I want to discover - or remember - things I do not think about. I want to encounter new ways to make decisions about myself and my place in the world. I want to travel with my fellow humans.

So again, and now with all possible meanings brought to bear, speaking it as a choice and not just as an unconscious act of submission to a habit, I say to myself and to those of you walking with me: I have time for this. I didn’t have time before, but I have time now.