A Day in the Life of a Time-Traveler

I’ll be completely honest.

 

The purpose of this blog post is to tide you people over until I’m done with my posts about Japan.

 

But keep reading—it’s good.

 

These are actually the thoughts that I had during the 10 days when we were not allowed to leave the ship.  I have to admit that by the end of the last day, I was completely and utterly out of it.  Someone tried to put our time in what I began to see as a ‘floating prison’ in perspective for me by reminding me that men used to spend months at sea to cross the Pacific.

 

I immediately had an image of men dressed in pre-modern sailing clothes leaping from the sides of wooden boats by the hundreds.

 

Sure, I’m being dramatic, but I think that in preparation for this trip, I conveniently skipped over the visualization part, and jumped right into planning.  Now I know that being confined to this ship, especially during the stormy days when we weren’t even allowed outside, was pretty rough.

 

Ok, whew, I got that off my chest.  No more complaining, I promise.  Just wanted to let the internet record show that reborn college students and cabin fever did not mix well.

 

In all seriousness, though, this trip is the embodiment of disorientation.

 

Let me take you on a little journey.  I imagine that many of you are having trouble understanding or visualizing what life must feel like here.  I know that even in my very brief attempts at imagining my live for the next few months, I definitely missed the mark.  So, I’ll try and make it easier for you.

 

Take one second and close your eyes (well, I guess re-open them after every line break so you can actually continue to read the post) and picture yourself in this scenario:

 

You’re standing outside at the stern (back… I think) of a 600 ft. ship, 6 stories in the air, staring out at the expanse of ocean that commands all of your peripheral vision. It’s chilling down a bit, and the water has gotten a little choppier so you have to hold onto the hand rails for balance.

 

 

You slightly mourn the loss of the last few days of bright sun and tanning outside and being able to walk without falling down.  They used to look something like this:

 

 

You realize haven’t seen land in 8 days, and every night for the last 6 nights, you’ve changed time zones.

 

In fact, 4 nights ago, you skipped an entire day when you crossed the International Date Line.  No Martin Luther King Day, a few people missed birthdays, and all of a sudden, at midnight on Sunday, it was magically Tuesday.

 

You soak in the fact that for one whole day you were the first to experience the future.

 

You turn around, still a bit foggy, and cautiously enter the sliding doors into the cafeteria where you (thankfully) can now spot several tables of familiar faces.

 

 

These people were complete strangers just two weeks ago, but now you have movie night with one table and Bible study with another.  You work with the entrepreneurs at the far corner of the room and you learn from the professors at the one closest to you.  You remember doing ‘Insanity’ workouts with one of the 60 year old ‘life-long learners’ the day before.

 

You laugh because your back hurts, but he doesn’t seem to feel a thing.

 

You walk through the dining hall on your way to you second class of the day.  You had one class two hours before and you’ll have one more after this, but yesterday you had just one 8am class and all day to relax (but really to get things done).  Your mind jumps to the paper you stayed up late writing and the assignment you have due the day you get back from Japan.  You laugh again, because you’ve already graduated.

 

You stumble to your cabin quickly to pick up a couple things before class.  You carefully traverse 6 floors of stairs to your room on the lowest deck of the ship.  You open the door and sigh, remembering that they closed your once comforting porthole window yesterday due to higher than normal swells.  But, you look over to your Texas flag and pictures of your friends and smile knowing how supported you are.

 

 

You realize you have a few minutes before class so you sit down and think through the last 2 weeks of your unique life.  You’ve had many moments of confusion sprinkled with more varied emotions than you had expected.

 

On the one hand you’re invigorated and inspired.  Everyone around you is excited, stirring, eager to see and do and experience.  You’ve worked with entrepreneurs on projects like creating clean water using no chemicals or energy or supplying the world’s poor with more sustainable ways to prepare their food.  You’ve learned new methods for design thinking and creation from the man who institutionalized them at the Stanford d.school.  You looked forward to traveling the world.

 

On the other hand, the combination of all these new things at once has left you a bit tired and overwhelmed.  You still haven’t figured out how to conceptualize this trip in your mind—is it a vacation, grad school, an interview, or all of the above?  You have this strange feeling of immediacy about everything even though you know in your mind that you have 3 more months of travel, classes, and work ahead.  You have trouble deciding if you should read for class, work on an entrepreneurial project, write your (long overdue) blog, rest, decompress, or just enjoy not being in an office.

 

Even in these moments of uncertainty you remember your motto:

 

Feel the fear, and do it anyway.

 

You realize that finding the balance of pursuing your future while being content with the present is part of the experience, part of the journey.  You remember something you read for one of your classes that was casually included in a textbook chapter, but struck you as particularly profound:

 

“The ancient Greeks contrasted hubris [or excessive pride] with arête.  Arête implies a humble striving for perfection along with the realization that such perfection cannot be reached.  With this notion in mind, we approach the study of anthropology cheerfully and with a degree of optimism.”

 

You think if someone can approach anthropology that way, then maybe it’s a good way to go about the study of life.

 

So, cheerfully and optimally, you play the song “I’m Walkin’ on Sunshine” as you dance your way out the door.

 

Ok, open your eyes again!

 

That was basically the day before we landed in Japan.  Hope you enjoyed a little insight into my brain and that my weaving thoughts weren’t too, well, disorienting.

 

Or hopefully they were, because then you will have gotten the full effect.

 

I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the trip thus far, which eerily summarizes how I felt, just in case you closed your eyes for too long and missed the diatribe above:

 

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

-Cesare Pavese

 

More to come on my Japanese adventures soon!

 

Question of the Day: What was the most surprising feeling you’ve had while traveling abroad?