...jiggity jig?

So… pretty much anytime I need to do something involving moving and deciding between many options with varying amounts of money I’m guaranteed to have trouble. Buuut rather than bore you with all the details of more Alyssa can’t-think-straight-I-so-anxiety-ridden blaaarghhh, let’s just say that the five hundred (semi-unnecessary) baht that I’m spending to stay at a nice AC’ed guesthouse in Khao Lak was completely worth it. Not because I get AC, free breakfast, and wi-fi but because I made two friends. Seriously—paying fifteen dollars to spend time with two people whose company was enjoyable and with whom the conversation was interesting is hands down, without a doubt, totally worth it. Hell, I often pay fifteen bucks to go out to dinner with people whose company I don’t even enjoy that much (and for many I do as well, of course). Subsequently, parts of our conversation along with my housing angst of this afternoon brought to mind the blog post I drafted a few days ago about home and the importance of place. I have realized that I am most anxious when I am uprooted (it make sense, shelter’s pretty vital; I think I would have thrived in the jungle as homo erectus. no one, I mean no one, gets between me and a place to sleep). I like the freedom of choice that I have right now, but the past few months have been the most anxious of my recent life. My life overall will in no way cease to be in flux when I return home, but there is something tangibly essential about feeling rooted to something or someone, somewhere.

Reading Said’s Reflections on Exile that Teeny posted on her blog got me thinking a lot about home and helped me sort through my recent thoughts on home and how I define it. This theme permeates nearly every entry I’ve written in some way or another and some posts may even outwardly contradict each other because the concept is, and my feelings on it are, so complex and often divergent.

Currently, my thoughts on this have been necessary to sorting out going home, why I chose to go home early, whether or not this is a good idea, etc etc. To be honest, I decided I was going to return to the states in October very early in my stay here (like, in the Hong Kong airport to be exact) and I spent considerable time making sure it wasn’t this line of thinking that colored my entire time here—skewed with the expectation of going home early I wondered if it led me to see the changed flight ticket as a done deal, when really there was nothing locking me in. I’ll never know if the reasons I give are just excuses, keeping me from seeing the “truth” behind my actions, but I think I’m being pretty honest with myself here so I’m going to take my carefully thought out (and less carefully emotionally salient) reasons as legitimate and worthy.

Okay, so, my reasons… I’m going home to see the leaves. To smell crisp fall air, to hike a frost-tipped mountain and come home to a burning woodstove and hot cider donuts. Yes, goddammit, those are my reasons. I love fall. I cannot pick a favorite season because my life is not complete without all of them, but this very central need for seasons has me questioning: why exactly do I need them? Am I less of a traveler, a universal 'accepter', a morpher because I am so connected to my “home” in Lake Placid, NY?

Hugo, quoted in Said, speaks beautifully to some of what I’ve been pondering— “the man who still finds his homeland sweet is a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”

Harumph, so what’s wrong with being a beginner? Well, in some ways nothing. But it becomes problematic when you are trying to assimilate into a different culture. Our connections to home often lead us to place a higher value on home than somewhere else—I have a deeper love for trees of pine than those of palm, for example. And that misconnect leads to us not truly understanding another place the same way as those who live there do. In the case of me volunteering at FED that’s deeply problematic for my relationship with the Burmese migrants I hope to know there. Place and home is obviously a very big issue for them already, as the majority of them feel out of place in Thailand and wish to return to Myanmar. With regards to how concepts of home, and the value we attribute to it, interferes with one’s ability to actually better the lives of those one wishes to help, being a beginner with a soft spot for the place of one’s upbringing is not necessarily a good thing. It can, most simply, lead one to see other places, cultures, and habits with a biased (and often condescending) viewpoint. However, I would argue that being a foreigner everywhere is not a good thing either.

Regardless of how I judge these differences, personal feelings of attributing significance to place and the mere existence of “homeland” (as defined, created, and emotionally fulfilled by us) are not going away any time soon. Therefore, how do you live with them? Is it something worth trying to change personally? And on a larger scale—how can you use them to understand situations like those of Palestine and Israel? Of Burmese migrants in Thailand?

However, regarding home and the very personal ties I have to it, I can’t help but feel that these ties are, for the most part, a good thing. While bonding with my new Canadian friends tonight over our mutual love of skiing I shared the story of Nini Win asking me what snow felt like. That experience was such a strong one for me, and her questions struck me squarely on the forehead. Did she really just ask, “What does snow feel like?”!?!? I literally choked back tears before answering, not for some sappy sentiment that “oh, she’s never seen snow and maybe never will, boohoo” but because it was something that was so absolutely fundamental to my existence; I was struck not so much by the childish awe that someone else had not experienced something I was born into (almost quite literally), but by the possibility that there is something in her life that is equally fundamental to her existence, and I didn’t even have a guess at what it was. Furthermore, I could only conjecture in negatives—she grew up in heat, so that meant no cold and no turtlenecks. It didn’t mean the existence of palm trees and Water Festivals, it meant the lack of seasons and changes in daylight hours.

Being traveled is a wonderful thing, but it does affect how I think about others who are less traveled. They cannot imagine snow, nor can they imagine life without coconuts always within an arm’s reach. As someone who has come to know what it’s like to live in Thailand, perhaps I’m a bit more understanding of the way of life here. But if I continue to look at it in terms of comparisons (most problematic of which being me/us vs. ‘them’), I am not improving any situation, nor am I allowing myself to truly be here. It’s not so much about being a stranger in every land as it is about being home in every land. But then, can that feeling come without a cost to one’s sentimental feelings towards one’s first home? Can one person’s home really exist in multiple culturally disparate places? And then… how do I define home, how do I use it to consider who I am and what it is I’m doing here?

While all I’m doing is posing questions, I plan on answering some of them in the future before I leave, through considering all of the obstacles I’ve faced at FED, and ways I hope other volunteers can overcome them. Furthermore, these thoughts dominate my continual ponderings of why I am here, what my motivations are for the next step, what my time here has meant, etc. and these thoughts deserve thoughtful mulling before I leave Thailand.