The Re-entry, Part II

The “real” world.  Except that it isn’t.  Well, no more real than where I just left anyway.

For the better part of the first week back, I felt like an alien life form in some parallel universe where everything was at once comfortable and familiar and yet still feeling hideously out of place.

I woke up the morning after my first State-side sleep wanting an Indian breakfast.  Like the sweet breakfast chapattis I had in Rajasthan or one of my favorite South Indian morning meals: uppam with potato and carrot stew.

Having arisen at 4 or 5 something, I fried myself an egg instead, and put it on butter jam toast.  That’s kind of Indian.  I mean, I had it a lot while I was there!

But the adaptation wasn’t just with the food.  The adjustment in general was hard, and truth be told, it’s not done yet though I don’t imagine the conclusion is too far away.  The time-pressure of Western civilization is so obvious when you are confronted with it abruptly.  There, there was chaos.  Nearly constant chaos.  But there was no pressure in the chaos; only the chaos.  Here, however, it’s all orderly.  There’s precious little room for the vivid unique expressions I saw throughout the subcontinent, let alone for deviation.  Everything so neat and tidy and organized and planned.  And the pressure to keep inside the lines.

I didn’t expect the re-entry to be as difficult as it was, but I was honestly torn.  I was excited to see my family and friends, to sleep in my own bed, to not have to worry about where I would find my next electrical outlet or my next liter of water.  But I missed India, the activity, the sounds, the people.  And the feeling that I wasn’t doing anything; that I was just being.  I didn’t feel like I had to “handle” much of anything once the trip got rolling.  Problems arose and I responded to them naturally.  It didn’t feel like I was doing anything at all, as if I were a clear glass cube without panes, things just passing through me.

But here.  Here there was effort.  Effort to get through the 1300-odd emails.  Effort to get through the latent voicemails, literally left weeks ago.  Effort to get a blog post finished.

I was eating more and more.  I would 3 times what I would normally have eaten at a meal two weeks before.  And then eat again a few hours later.

I realized that I was eating to fill myself up.  But it wasn’t food that I was trying to collect inside me.  That’s just how my body interpreted my “grabbing.”

I felt like I was going to lose whatever I had found there.  And so I resisted, which then made the re-entry harder.  What was I going to lose?  The things that made me sing on the inside.  The ability to notice details like I was seeing through human eyes and hearing through human ears for the first time.  The simple naturalness of action.  I was lamenting these things, mourning their loss, and digging in to keep a hold of them.  Or of their memory.

But then I realized, not just in my mind as a simple platitude, but in the center of my chest, something that I knew I already knew on some level.  That whatever is Real is never lost.  That Truth is impossible to lose.  It simply cannot be lost.  Even if it fades into the darkest recesses of our minds, the very DNA on which the memories were stored, disintergrated, never to be consciously recognized again, even then, these things are not lost.  Impossible to contain or hold, because they were never our possessions, they belong to no man.  The Truth is not fragile in that way.

And as I absorbed that realization, I started to feel like I was regaining my equilibrium.  I stopped stuffing food into my body.  The clouds began receding.  I started noticing things again.  Like the rich man whistling to himself with his windows down at the stop light.  The meaty smell of hamburger joints.  The visual perfection of the identically space street lamps.  I listened to the birds in my own backyard like I had never heard the chattering of the robins or the squirrels, or the shriek of the Blue Jay.  I watched the little dew drops in the grass sparkle like tiny diamonds when the sun came up.

I realized that I hadn’t lost anything, despite it being quite cloudy there for a few days.

I’m glad to be back.  In the land of Opportunity.  Where with a touch of adjustment in perception, anything really is still possible.

Where to next?