This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’m mad. That’s what she said anyway. Mad. But that she understands. I’m not really sure how that works. I mean, if I am really nuts then the understanding bit should not be possible, or at least be abnormally difficult.
She is finishing up a degree in Law and will soon be headed to Johannesburg to make a comfortable life there. I have made a comfortable life there and want to leave it. Go to do something else. Maybe photography. Perhaps a bit of exploring. I’ve no idea really, but I want to live again – to be challenged. Partly I suspect that being out of my normal life for two weeks is starting to affect me. It’s not that I think i’ve gone particularly mad, just that I’ve become different.
His time is short, ended as always on the journey home, but while he lives, he lives.
Somewhere in the last few days, Richard-of-normal-world had changed into traveling-and-dreaming-doppelgänger Richard. Whenever it happens, it’s as if my real life has been suspended, fading into the background and I get to pick up where I left off with a different identity – the one that continues to learn more about the world, watching with a sense of wonder and novelty again. His time is short, ended as always on the journey home, but while he lives, he lives.
Reveling in the days that stretch into weeks, spent in the dust of roads traveled in the company of people with the beautiful, exciteable souls. The mad ones – delirious at the lives they can yet live. It used to be that the mad me was nothing more than a cloud of fond memories. Memories made in Johor Baru, in the dust of a bus clambering over the passes of Laos as I deliciously pressed my face to the dirty glass in glee. It was of nights in Cambodia and days spent in continual learning and dreaming the big dreams. The ones that matter.
The most interesting roads we travel can be the hardest to leave.
And then, somewhere, those memories became a person. Too many memories, you see, are dangerous. They become an identity.
More than a springboard to “what if”, they become “I have”.
I have seen the sun rise over Angkor Wat, I have watched drumming circles on Venice Beach and chilled stars over the soul-stilling silence of the Karoo at night. So many dreams of what-ifs have become the life of the me who has. Who wants to again. And more. And forever.
Perhaps thats what she meant. I’m mad because I live two lives. One which does what must be done. Who continually values his responsibilities to the world over the falling grains in his hourglass, and feels trapped for it. The other wants to dance with insecurity, live out the days in learning, seeking. Valuing meaning over mortality. Being over security.
I’m mad because I can’t be both. Not forever. In the end, one of me must win out.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I’d like to think that studying journ/being a journalist kind of lets you be both…There’s only one way to find out for yourself ;)
May 4th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Travel anywhere has a visceral aspect and an inherent freedom.In a sense you become invisible,the observer of others lives without any of the responsibility-especially when you take refuge behind a lens!You are a godlike creature who transcends the mundane reality of deadlines,income tax and commuter traffic which, unfortunately ,is the real world for most of us.Maybe we eventually sell out and we trade that godlike status for the commonplace -and lose our souls along the way.More’s the pity.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:54 am
I think you can find a middle ground where you are both. I like to think my two selves are only a few shades apart. Maybe I’m kidding myself. May the best man win.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am
The one thing I always remember from your travel stuff is how you feel that you are somehow not the same person when you travel. Now there is some psycho-stuff here that I think is NB (but not sure if its true). Well, the brain has wired reactions to all sorts of events. This is kind of like the automaticity argument. When in a familiar context, your brain naturally tends towards certain ‘default’ actions and ways of being. Neural routes and all that. Now, when you are outside of the context, those neural paths of ‘typical’ action are no longer strongly activated, and so you find yourself doing things that you would not ‘normally’ do.
Now this idea is just part one. You see, I like this idea of desires, and orders of desires. A first order desire is something immediate to me. I want to eat the chocolate. A second order desire has to do with what we desire our first order desires. I want to be a person who wants to eat chocolate. Or I want to be a person who is not tempted by chocolate. Whatever. One is to do with how we interact with the world, the other to do with how we want to interact with the world. But a little more abstractly, the first is basically who we are and what defines our behaviour, the second is our own ideal of who we want to be. A person in harmony *is* the person they want to be, their first order desires are the same as their second order desires. They are not character-hypocrits (as we all are).
Now part three, put these concepts together. In general, in the day-to-day routine of life, we have a set of predefined first order desires. These arise automatically out of context. You finish work, you are hungry, you are too lazy to cook, and macdonalds pops into your mind. Though your second order desire is to eat healthier and learn to cook, the first order automised response is too big. So you fail.
But see what happens when out of context. You no longer have those strong first order desires which arise in a familiar context – just because your neurons are firing differently. What does this mean? It means that you somehow have the ability to allow your second order desires to dictate your first order desires – i.e. to become the person you want to be.
So in your post, you talk about reconciling the two persons. I think this is a mistake. You want to kill the first person, and replace it with a second. Travel, then, in this sense, is a sort of therapy. A tool for becoming the person you want to be. Of course it also helps you to realise your second order desires, but thats a different story altogether.
I think this is actually a crucial reason why this has become so important. Its a means to a betterness. Of course, *travel* is not strictly necessary – any proper attempt at switching your head context out of automatic mode will help in everyday life, but travel is just an easy way of doing this.
I like this as a base. No idea if any scientific theory backs it up, though
June 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
There was a corollary to this that I missed. Ah, that was it. Well I’ve suggested that travel is good for two reasons. The first, I think we agree, is the broadening of experiences – such that you gain a wider set of options to consider for the person who you want to be. That is, you gain more ideas of potential second order desires, and you gain more of an idea of which second order desires you wish to adopt. (Did I mention that you have greater control of your second order desires than your first order desires? This is
because of automaticity, again).
The second was this new issue about context and automaticity – that your automatic first order desires are weaker when outside of a familiar context, and this gives you scope to ‘control’ them, or to impose your first order desires instead.
So far I’ve been speaking about travel. But context switching can be more extreme than this. Travel is a temporary measure and not symmetrical with the daily dealings of life that we are use to – you don’t need to think about jobs, or housing, or cleaning, or eating in any long-term sense – everything is immediate. So although travel gives a taster of being out of context, it doesn’t replace a context of some type with a different context of the same type (life A for life B), it swaps one context type for a different context of a
different type (life A for fun-time B). And so the kind of ways in which you change in context B are not always transferable to context A. Make sense, or just nonsense?
So I’m sure you see what I am getting at. (I’m writing this in the middle of a library in a primary school, overhearing the teacher from the class next door, and I want to strangle the woman. Throttle. Dead. Just thought you should know.)
So what I’m getting at. Yes – this is all might be nonsense, but it sounds like sense to me. Thus a motivation for a longer trip where self-fending is necessary sounds to me like a good way to test this idea, because that really would be (even if for only 6 months) a life
A/life B swap. I’m guessing that if you had to ask John he might say whether this makes any sense at all (I’m not sure what there is to be said about returning to context A, and whether context B has changed any of those automatic first order desires).
I’m still trying to figure out how works out for me – since obviously it looks like I’ve done the life A for life B swap – but it doesn’t feel very exciting. Perhaps this is because I was not in the right frame of mind when I arrived. My other explanation is that the context switch actually wasn’t that dramatic. In certain ways I suppose it is, but culturally and socially, its not particularly inspired, in many ways more repressed than Johannesburg, I think. Strangely, I find people here have a narrower concept of life than people from South Africa (on average) – so instead of learning you find yourself constantly trying to explain. This is a generalisation though, its not quite as bad as all that, but I’m just trying to explain my experience such that it fits my theory (very unscientific!)
Alright. I’m off to put on my gloves, find a rope or a wire or something, maybe a sock to stop the screaming. I think the children will grow up better people for it. I’ll try to blog from prison (I wonder if there are any prison blogs….)
June 17th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
[...] and Richard has STOLEN them and stuck them as comments on his site – so I’ll point you to this post where you can read all my brilliant thoughts. Disclaimer: all scientfic ideas therein are purely [...]
October 31st, 2009 at 8:18 am
“Who wants to again. And more. And forever.” True! This future-looking is the essential other half of the “I have” identity–without it, we’d just be crusty bags of old stories.
Thanks for pointing to this post. Makes me think that the conflict might not even be about victory of one identity or the other, but rather to merge or not to merge…