The perfect moment

Have you ever had a perfect moment? I think I've had several, each one more perfect than the last, reveling to me that the "perfect moment" would pale next to the coming perfect moment.

When I was in second grade, my perfect moment came when my best friend Sarah Bolan invited me to spend the night with her. All the 7-year-old longings of being best friends and having it known culminated in that invitation and although it was 40 years ago, I remember playing under the apple trees in her yard, seeing her horses and knowing that my best friendship was reciprocated.

Willa Cather once wrote, "Out of every wandering in which people and places come and go in long successions, there is always one place remembered above the rest because the external or internal conditions were such that they most nearly produced happiness . . ."

Perhaps Willa only had one of those places, but I've had several.

Another one that comes to mind was graduate school at the University of South Carolina. I was still under 30 and studying journalism with a handful of graduate students who were passionate about writing.

My best friend, Janine, was from Oxford, England and had once traveled to the top of Mt. Kilamanjaro for Christmas Eve. I also hung out with Pamela, who actually lived in my neighborhood and was always ready to stop what she was doing to meet me for a walk and discussion of deep things, important things -- like philosophy and which professors were dating which students, what we thought of religion, how it felt to lose a child, what was the easiest way to get As in our courses and more. She knew the actor, Mark Harmon, who had just finished filming the Presidio, and it was cool to hear her talk about "Maaaark" with a barely discernible "r" in her posh British accent.

Then there was the lovely Morman guy who I had a secret crush on (pity he was married) and was the only one who joined me in striving for perfect grades on every assignment. He was in my study group and I loved, admired and was envious of him all mixed up together.

Some of us used to meet for chicken Caesar salads and drink cheap wine at obscure little restaurants in downtown Columbia. It felt like a group of writers meeting at a cafe in Paris in the 1920s -- all so young, having no idea they would one day become great.

One night Janine called us all up because her Air Force, globe-trotting American husband was in town and she wanted to have a party. That was the first time I had curry and all kinds of lovely dishes from around the world. I think the husband and I were the only Americans and it was a wonderful evening of trying new foods, listening to a mish mash of languages and talking to people who knew things and cared about the same things I did.

I felt strangely alive among these students from Europe and China and the U.S., all of us with the common bond of mass communication. I never wanted it to end and in a way it didn't -- because it will always be with me and it changed me in small, indiscernable ways -- but permanently.

Of course, there have been many more significant moments and places -- my six years in Japan, the day I got my daughter from China, my first kiss, but those things are supposed to produce happiness. It's expected. It's those other moments and seasons when you almost didn't even know you were happy; you have to look back to realize that now you are missing the ingredients that, mixed together, most nearly produced happiness.

Willa Cather realized that it's hard to anticipate what will comprise your perfect moment, but one thing you can be sure of, you will have at least one and you will remember it forever.

Cather writes,"One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame."

Have you had your perfect moment yet? I hope so. Please comment and share, what was a moment that most nearly produced happiness for you.

You Can't Get There From Here - Coming Home

Maybe one reason I love Gale Forman's book about her year of traveling around the world is the recognition of another misfit: "I am a member of the tribe of the odd. Have been since, as a little girl, I came to realize that I was not like a Amy or a Jenny. I was a Weird Girl."

I was a weird girl, too, but not for the same reasons. Gale embraced her weirdness by dying her hair unnatural colors and doing interpretive dances to the Velvet Underground at talent shows -- in elementary school! I was bewildered by mine. It wasn't until I was grown up that I understood why the popularity I obliviously enjoyed in second grade was replaced by a polite distance from the third graders who didn't want the misfortune of my dad's untimely death in a car accident to rub off on them.

When I moved to Japan, I discovered a bunch of other weird people. When Gale lived in England for a year as an exchange student at an avante garde boarding school, she edited a literary journal and marched against apartheid. "I became enmeshed in the biggest, coolest group of weirdos I'd ever met. Consequently, I fell in love -- with travel, with the thrill of plunging myself into the unknown, and with the joy of coming up connected."

It may seem counter-intuitive, but when I was in Japan, I felt a greater sense of belonging than I ever did in the U.S. The very fact that every westerner I met automatically was an outsider forged a bond between us. I still feel that bond with people who've lived abroad. It's OK to be weird in a foreign land. People expect it.

Living abroad made me feel I was a child of the world, someone who could sit on the steps of Bangkok's World Trade Center on Christmas Day, speaking Japanese with my Thai guide (who didn't speak English). That was the apex of my years in Asia. It was the single coolest moment of my life and I felt I was a part of something big.

Coming home is an emotional experience and I was struck by Gale's description: "An hour after the plane took off from London, I started to cry. This was surprising considering that for the past several weeks I had been thinking of nothing but home . . . Home, where I could meet friends and not have the conversation start with some variation of, 'So, have you ever been to Lake Titicaca?' Home, where I could get a cup of coffee without having to get dressed first. . . And yet, here I was crying on the plane because I was going home."

Me, too -- even though the stress of living in Japan had driven me nearly to a nervous breakdown. "A funny contradiction," Gale writes. "But if I had learned anything this year it was that contradictions are complementary, that a truth and its opposite exist in harmony. It's how the shrinking world was destroying cultures just as it was creating new ones."

And now the incredible experience -- being a part of something as big as the whole world -- was over. "Standing in the terminal [after arriving home] I had the sense not just that the adventure was over, but that it had never even happened," Gale writes. "Was I the person who had taught crazy Doctor Bi Chinglish [Chinese/English]? Who learned to joust? Who had prayed with the Lemba?"

Coming home, you worry that life will never be so big ever again. But it can and it will. An experience like living in Japan for seven years, or traveling to obscure parts of the globe and living there for months at a time has a deep impact. You can never go back to the way you were before. Gale understands that, too. The last line of her book reads: "Life, it turns out, is a big as you're willing to make it."

If you would like to purchase Gale's book, "You Can't Get There From Here," scroll through the carousel on the right, click on the book's icon and you will be taken to the book's page on Amazon.com.

You Can't Get There From Here - Terrorism

Part 2 of an excellent book by Gale Forman on her year's travels to little-known corners of the world (see previous blog posts for more info).

September 11 and Terrorism

As I mentioned previously, the notion of globalization is somewhat distasteful to a lot of people. In her book, Gale points out that we don't like the fact that the rules have changed. "Thirty years ago, it was of little consequence to a Manhattan banker that some guys in a cave in Afghanistan hated everything he and his country stood for. Now, it matters; it matters a lot."

In fact, Gale's trip was scheduled to take place in January 2002. "The terrorist attacks gave us pause, made us reconsider our trip, and ultimately reminded us why we should go: To forget the humanity in others is to risk forgetting our own."

So they went and discovered that "the world is much scarier on a TV screen than it is in a spice bazaar or a tropical jungle."

When you get right down to it, people are really the same under the skin: they love, they search for truth, they want a better world. Even terrorists.

You Can't Get There From Here - globalization

I'm reading a wonderful book by Gayle Forman called "You Can't Get There from Here." Gale and her husband took off a year to travel around the world -- kind of. They decided to visit places that are on the fringe -- like an island in Fiji that has a whole transvestite citizenry who are treated like a third sex -- and stay there for several months to really become temporary locals. When they went to India, Gale got work as an extra in Bollywood films and her insider's look is fascinating. Anyway, my treat for this week is a series of quotes from her book. Enjoy.

Cultural imperialism and globalization
I actually teach this as part of my intro to mass comm class so I appreciated her insights. You may think you don't know what cultural imperialism is, but you probably do. It brings to my mind the Starbucks inside China's Forbidden City, the McDonald's at the bottom of Rome's Spanish Steps and the Coke machines on Mt. Kilimanjaro. It is the idea that a powerful nation imposes its culture on a weaker nation -- think England and India during Queen Victoria's reign.

Gale sums up the controversy quite well: "Depending on your worldview, they[products of globalization] either herald the dawn of a beautiful age of international cooperation or foretell some grim world populated by prepubescent sweatshop workers and a monoculture of Gap-wearing, latte-drinking droids."

But Gale has a different view of globalization hunkered down between these two extremes: "Globalization is really about people, about what happens when your culture shows up in my living room or when my way of life is tossed into your lap. It's about the marriages -- some arranged, some chosen, some forced -- that result when everything gets mixed up."

And that is what I love about traveling, too. The excitement is never-ending. When I lived in Japan my lap was usually full of someone else's way of life and and I thrived on the variety. When it got to be too much I would retreat into my westernized apartment or call my ex-pat buddies and go to a place that served Western food. But I was never bored.

I remember during my first month there I sat outside on the front steps and looked at an empty field across the street and it was thrilling -- because I was looking at an empty field in JAPAN -- and next to that field were rice paddies on one side and a house with a tile roof on the other side. Living in another country is endlessly stimulating -- which can be wonderful and exhausting -- but never boring.

If you're interested in purchasing this book, it's on the Amazon.com carousel to the right.

Better than nothing

Frankly, life hasn't been so sweet lately, forcing me to scale back my expectations of everything -- even myself.  And that's OK, because:

You must take a step before you can walk a mile.  Ten percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing.

Found that quote in my journal -- I know not by whom.

Why we pray

It's something I've never been able to figure out -- why do we pray?  Yeah, yeah, I've heard that old chestnut about how it's not for God but it's for us.  But what if it isn't really doing anything for me either?  What's the point?  This insight from Joanna Laufer struck me as one reason:

"Prayer is a choice.  For us to pray, to give thanks, or to voice our questions and doubts shows that we are choosing to leave an opening on our spirits.  Without this opening, there is no vessel, no place into which God can breathe."

The Bible in 50 words

I found this stuck in the pages of my journal, hastily tossed to my printer when I lived in Japan.  It was one of those millions of e-mails that get forwarded forever, but I haven't seen it in years so it struck me once again today:

The Bible in 50 words

God made

Adam bt

Noah arked

Abraham split

Joseph ruled

Jacob fooled

Bush talked

Moses balked

Pharaoh plagued

People walked

Sea divided

Tablets guided

Promise landed

Saul freaked

David Peeked

Prophets warned

Jesus born

God walked

Love talked

Anger crucified

Hope died

Love rose

Spirit flamed

Word spread

God remained

No, it doesn't really sum up the Bible, but it's kind of cool.