It's almost five in the morning and I feel like my eyelids are going to close shop on me at any moment, and yet my body is so filled with energy that I can't make myself go to bed. I'm so afraid I might forget everything that's running through my mind right now, everything I'm feeling. I know that it's already slipping away, that it's already fundamentally different from how it was the moment I realized I should write this down.
It's incredible how periods of absolute confusion and uncertainty can sometimes lead to moments of almost perfect lucidity; it's not almost perfect because it eradicates the doubt, but because it makes you feel like doubt is okay and natural. I'm being incredibly abstract. Let me explain. A few days ago I had a sort of crisis where I felt like I had absolutely no idea where my academic career was heading. I was worried about how I would balance out my personal life with my career, how I would support myself financially, how I'd get the most out of my life in general. I was trying to understand how many parts of each sector of life I needed to make a good whole; I was essentially trying to make a recipe out of life. I know that I am not the only one who does this; we all over-analyze our lives and how much of what we're actually putting into them is beneficial, worthy, good, bad, etc. The lucidity doesn't come on it's own (or if it does then it hasn't in my experience). I've always had the urge to discuss my inner dilemmas with people whom I trust, and a lot of the time they point things out to me that seem obvious when I hear them, but that I didn't realize because I'm so close to the issues at hand.
So armed with advice from a loved one, I set out to try and appease my insecurities by talking to people who've probably had the same kinds of questions--my TA's and professors. I'm still in the process of doing this, but I've already talked to one TA who cleared things up for me a little bit. She encouraged me to go to graduate school for Cultural Anthropology, and assured me that there were many more options than I had originally anticipated there being. She told me that, yes, Cultural Anthropology and Graduate School take you away from many social things you may not wanted to have missed, but it's worth it and you learn a lot from the experience. This really comforted me; I remembered that I don't want to live a generic life. I want my life to be both very painful and very happy at different points in time. The last thing I want is to lead a mediocre lifestyle. After talking to Nell (my TA) I realized that I really do want to work in Cultural Anthropology and that I don't have to know exactly what I want to study within the field right now. I should just let things flow.
Pretty much as soon as I decided to let things take their own course (to an extent), I forced myself to calm down and sit and listen to people more. I've been so busy with schoolwork and extracurricular activities that I didn't even realize I was shushing people I really wanted to hear from because I thought I didn't have time for them. So tonight after I finished my reading for tomorrow I went outside into my living room and sat down with my roommates and my friend to talk. It was already very late and I knew that I should have been getting to bed in order to function properly tomorrow, but I knew that I needed to just sit down and participate in discussions within my own household. Afterall I'm going to be a Cultural Anthropologist, listening is what we DO. And really, the more I think about it, the more I value stopping and listening and talking to people over other kinds of priorities. Because the most valuable things I'm going to learn during the course of my lifetime are NOT going to be things that I read in textbooks, or papers that I write, or even research that I conduct. The most valuable things I will learn are things I will probably think about on my deathbed, are things I learned from people that I met and interacted with, people who've challenged me and taught me things and made me feel uncomfortable.
Basically I live with two guys. Both of them are immigrants; one is form Palestine and the other is from Egypt. Until recently I had been too immersed in work to really sit down and talk to them for a very long period of time, but now I've realized how exhilirating talking to them really is, how much they're going to teach me, the power manifested in our triangular relationsihp. I feel so ashamed even mentioning that I had been too busy to talk to them for very long earlier; I'm studying Anthropology! How could I place texts over people? How could I allocate time in such a way as to ignore that which I'm going to learn the most from? It's completely beyond me, but I'm so glad that it smacked me across the face tonight. (Or maybe it did a couple of days ago...) Anyway, we sat down in our living room with my friend, Jenya, and discussed the differences in our cultures, religions, and origins. We discussed the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, communism, immigration, refugees, cultural boundaries, marriage, sex, family, race, rules, and authority. I wanted to tape record the whole thing, but they said they'd feel uncomfortable and that maybe I could take notes. But I realized that these are my friends, I'm not studying them, I don't want to sit there with a notepad and write things down instead of looking them in the eye. I just listened and knew that I'd feel the urge to write later. We sat there as the hours went by and really LEARNED things about one another. We talked about how we were different, about what we were afraid of. My roommates asked me how I felt upon finding out where they were from originally. Jenya and I asked them how they felt about our being Jews. We tried to figure out why so many different people hate Jews and we couldn't find an answer, or why there's such hostility towards Muslims now in Ameirca. We talked about the differences between Israel vs. Palestine and Judaism vs. Islam. We discussed things that were uncomfortable, and yet when we finally decided to go to bed I felt like I was part of a new family, and like I had stumbled upon something so magnifacent, so valuable that I have to share it with everyone. I came upon these two fascinating people who can teach me SO much, and together maybe we can educate others, maybe we can teach the world a thing or two. I know I'm very ideallistic, but I don't see how experiences like these wouldn't produce such grandoise hopes. If I can sit in a room with a rather religious Jewish girl and two devout Muslims (one of which is from Palestine) and discuss these things peacefully, and UNANIMOUSLY come up with the conclusion that "We Are All One Unit" (as my Palestinian roommate said to me) then why can't we help others realize that?
There's so much more I can write about, but I'm seriously falling asleep. Hopefully this entry will serve as an outline for me tomorrow so that I may elaborate later.
Posts
