I have said it before and I’ll say it again, I am addicted to profundity. I am addicted to huge experiences that leave me befuddled at first but then irrevocably changed in the end. However, it’s sometimes hard to remember that when you are in the thick of befuddlement. When the doubts start to set in and you question motives that you came up with months ago…… the only option is to either stick it out or go home. One question I have been asking myself lately is;
Why do we love the struggle??? What, after scams, robberies, intestinal trauma, emotional trauma, and things of the sort, keeps us coming back for more? When I left Tanzania, I was so ready to come home. I had had enough of being called “mzungu,” of being ripped off, of riding in a cramped mini-bus, of the pollution, of diarrhea, of always worrying if I were exposing my knees…… etc. But for some reason as the months passed and my memories started becoming selective, I only remembered the positive things. Why, directly after I travel in a developing country (I haven’t been to many) do I relish in being home, only to find that a few months down the road I start to feel the tug back to the very things I was so sick of; back to the struggle? I was once talking with my dear friend Hadley about my “addiction.” She listened very closely, as she always does, and then handed me this pearl: “It is easy to find things that are profound abroad- the hard part is finding them at home.” She is totally right- having those eye-opening experiences comes easy when you travel- it’s almost as if the world hands them to you on a plate. It is no more noble to search for profundity abroad than at home. All it takes to travel is money- that’s it. Yet we are still addicted to the foreign quest, still thirsty for the foreign unknown, which usually happens to require foreign currency. What I’m trying to learn right now is that I can still quench that thirst right in my hometown, just in a different way. That would be more of a challenge.
So which is the right way to go? Travel with a noble purpose?
Who defines what a noble purpose is? If your purpose in traveling is to see Mt Everest, I think that is just as valuable a purpose as going to Uganda to work for a non-profit. It all depends on what you want to do with your life, and what makes you happy. That’s what we’re all after anyway, right? Thinking about this, the other day I sat myself down to make a list of the Top 10 things that make me happy. Here is what I came up with:
Being with/near my friends
Being with/near my family
Being with/near my love
Good food
Exercising
Children
Being in nature
Seeing new things
Music/ playing piano
Feeling free/independent
Notice anything? All of these things I have access to at home.
None require living abroad.
This is what it boils down to: despite my bouts of homesickness, in no way do I regret coming here. To turn this opportunity down would have been nothing short of foolish. Had I stayed at UNC my final semester, I could have easily been thinking, “Man, I could be in Cape Town right now!” though while I was in Cape Town I started to kick myself, thinking, “why was I so eager to give up something so good in search of something unknown?” And that’s just it- there is no way that I could have known, no way to ignore that powerful tugging to do come back to this part of the world. The whole point of this journey is to figure all of this stuff out. And it’s not even that I am learning the hard way- I think I am learning this the only way I can- by actually doing it. If I were in America right now and Andrew Finn were here doing this project, I would be working 24/7 to find a way to get to Malawi. Why are the “things you’re missing” always become so magnified when you’re away? To me, it’s just the age-old conundrum of wanting to be where you are not.
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