The Tourist

I've written this post over the course of the last few weeks. it feels like the more I write the less coherent it gets, so I'm gonna post it and see what happens.

The first days here had a surreal element about them that stemmed from the fact that it was all so sudden. I was in Missouri one day, and I sat in a floating air-conditioned room for a day, and I was in Thailand. Air travel has this quality to it that seems to warp our sense of spacetime. Places we’ve only seen in books and on screens become real with little work and little time, and we sit oblivious to all the rivers and mountain passes and oceans and volcanoes and dusty trails and villages that it would take to make the journey without our precious flying boats. As a result in those first few days it feels like you’ve been teleported to another planet, which along with the jetlag and the new climate seems to put you in a fog that slowly dissolves as the hours accumulate. 

There’s a fairly popular youtube video that you’ve perhaps seen where a man is shown doing a funny dance. the background changes, and it’s still him doing his funny dance in some new exotic location. as the film continues, it’s revealed that he’s traveled the entire world, and in each place he’s done his funny dance. and the music is playing and it’s easy to be excited for him and have misguided feelings about the triumph of the human spirit.

when I first saw the film, I had the same misguided feelings. To me there’s always been that naive excitement of a new passport stamp, new adventures in new places, having distant cities come up in conversation and being able to gloat about how I had been there and that the local landmarks are lovely or that the socioeconomic conditions are fascinating. or whatever. I think it’s a natural human desire to look like you’ve done lots of cool things because it it gives you a reassurance that you’re living your life well. But I’m growing out of it. out of the idea that I need to have a list of objective accomplishments that validate me as a person. Now, that isn’t to say I want to do nothing, or accomplish nothing. It’s just that our generation seems fixated on this very narrow view of success that substitutes the beauty and the art of living well for a collection of certificates and qualifications.

And the thing is, I LOVE places. I love finding myself in whole new coordinates. in a world where everything seems to be so instant and disposable, being in a whole new city with twelve million new people and countless new possibilities for adventure is great. But I don’t want it to be the idea of the place that captivates me. I don’t want to spend my entire life living in new places just so I can go to dinner parties and look more interesting than the people I’m talking to. I’m learning to love places for what they are, and how they can change me and let me learn, instead of only looking for what they can offer me. The tourist in me is dying. Or rather, the intellectual in me is trying to kill the tourist in me. In some small part of every person there’s a tourist, and that tourist needs to be dealt with. It’s the tourist part of us that can look at someone else starving or in pain and resort to taking inconsequential mental notes or feeling bothered that the universe has uncomfortable aspects to it. It’s the tourist in us that insists on being treated better than the people around us, and tells our minds to only go to places in the world that we know are safe and we know will have enough amenities or scenery to justify leaving our air-conditioned homes. Which is fine, if we’re selfish and ordinary.

Today in lecture we talked about how God is holy, and how because of that we’re supposed to be holy too. Which seems stupid on first thought, because we interpret holiness as perfection; that the opposite of holiness is sinfulness. and that would be a ridiculous request because we as humans can’t really do perfection. but that isn’t what he’s really asking of us. To be holy is to be set apart. Holiness isn’t asking perfection of us, it’s asking us to not be ordinary. It’s not about what we abstain from, it’s the actions we DO take that make us holy. And I’m learning that there are parts of me that are like this. and parts of me that are ordinary. The part of me that has spent hundreds of hours playing video games. the part of me that desired stability so much I was willing to spend my life pursuing the consumerist dream that has disposed of so much of our generation. the part of me that would spend the bulk of every prayer asking god for whatever thing or relationship that at the time I thought would complete me. 

On my wall back home there’s a map of the United States. I bought two gel pens, one gold and one silver. With the silver one I began to trace out the outline of each state I had been to. As I got farther along, each completion would only make the missing states that I hadn’t been to more glaring. The main problem was that it wasn’t that meaningful. So I had stepped foot in Idaho, who cared? I had no tangible memories or experiences of Idaho. I flirted the Idaho-Wyoming border in Yellowstone when I was seven. With the gold pen, however, I began to fill in all the highways I had been on. With every trace of line I could think of stories. The wrong turn in tennessee that sent us all the way to Indiana by accident. the spiderweb of lines between KC and Kirksville that represent every back-highway I could find that connected my two American homes. the line that ends ominously just south of Ottumwa and starts back up again near the north of town because St. Simon didn’t make it and we had to walk those few miles. The long ribbons that stretched to each coast because my parents had things they wanted to show us, and dreams they wanted us to dream too. Even the labels that indicate cities gain new meaning, and their names fill my heads with images of people and memories and mental pictures. The silver tracings that aim for completion fail miserably; even if I made it to every state there wouldn’t be much meaning to it. The gold lines, though, that spiderweb all across the continent, symbolize the things that have given my life meaning. Not because of the roads themselves but because of what happened on them. And it’s turned me into less of a completionist. If my life is a map, I don’t so much want one in which everything is filled in and colored all neat, but instead one that just explodes, with notes in the margins and little symbols and overlays that explain everything; not just where I’ve been, but how I was changed there, and how I changed others, and who was important to me there and why. 

I guess what I’m asking is, why do we do what we do? when I was younger I had this appeal of just doing things for the sake of doing them and being able to brag about them. I got into music and I did this awful thing where if I was in a conversation about music I would try to find a tasteful way to work in a bullet-point list of every great band I've ever seen. But life, dear children, is not about the pile of ticket stubs that is scattered about the room. it's about the memories and the moments and the way your mind realizes that the thing you're going through is important and begins to carve out space in your mind for all of it. And I say that after just taking a whiff of my pillow. I cleaned the pillowcase this morning and let it catch the breeze, and for some reason when I smell it tonight it reminds me of being 14 years old and being at scout camp and being terrified that I'd wake up in the morning having wet the bed. Every once in a while I have these moments where I just let the music take over and just seem to feel every good and bad thing that's ever happened to me come back to me all at once, like a crowded party filled with old acquaintances. and the reoccurring theme throughout my entire life is that all the things I once thought mattered don't matter anymore. I especially think about all the worry I've spent on wanting people to think that I'm great. I used to want to accomplish things because I wanted to be thought of as the kind of person who accomplishes things. I used to want people to love me because I thought that affirmed that I was worthy of love. God is teaching me, and changing me, to be the kind of person who loves just to love and acts just to act, to do the things that make life better for people just because those things should be done and not because I need to win some useless award and feel important. The thing about god changing you is that you have to let go of a lot of the things you thought were so necessary. 

This week's teachings about the fear of God ended on something of a tangent about the cost of discipleship. And it's something I've always sort of known, that a lot of the things normal people get to expect out of life I have to accept that I won't be getting, but it makes me kind of excited. because had I chosen the normal path, there are a lot of things that I could expect, but I don't know the destination of this narrow path. I only know the way. And it just seems more and more like in order to follow it I have to change what I want out of life. Psalm 37:4 says that if I take delight in the lord, he would give me the desires of my heart. This doesn't mean what I thought it did. I used to look at this as a transaction. I would do some odd jobs that God needed some temporary help to do, and I would get paid my desires like a paycheck, is how I thought it would go down. But instead I began to actually take delight in the Lord. and all of the things I once thought mattered don't matter anymore.

As I would talk to people and explain what I'm doing with my life right now, there was one odd reoccurring theme. "That's great. It's so good that you're doing this. You're young and you aren't tied down and you can do this and get all sorts of stories. You only have a window of about 3 years when you're allowed to do this sort of thing, so have fun while you can. Soon you're gonna get old and your body is going to have demands and your commitments will stack up and you're going to need to be a productive member of society." I'm learning to not just hear these lies and just shut up and let old people say what they need to say to sleep at night. that sounds harsh, and I'm sorry for the way that might make you feel if your life isn't what you thought it would be. But I have to say it, to call that attitude a lie, because it is. I come from a culture that is so addicted to stability and comfort that it is in a coma. And I will not settle down, and I will not choose myself over my neighbor. I will not stop loving, will not stop hoping, and I will not stop working for love and for justice and for intimacy with god. Soon the paper money will be worth nothing, our stuff will rot, and our bodies will stop working the way they should, and all that will be left and all that will really matter in our entire lives is the love we have for god and each other. and I'm willing to be poor and lonely and tired and sick and uncomfortable and spend my time generously in response to that truth, no matter how many reasonable people tell me I should be smarter than that.