Homesick
I suppose there’s a natural order to things.
There’s a way that the universe is arranged, and no matter how good our science is, or how much faith we have in God, or how hard we work for something, there is an order to things that we just cannot change.
Things have to be this way, because if there wasn’t that natural order then anything would be possible, including all the most horrible things in the world happening to one person, and no matter how absurd or ridiculous or outrageous it was we couldn’t say “that’s impossible” and feel better about ourselves because it would, in fact, be possible. This idea of an absolute order, when things are at their worst, is a comforting idea. It is the faith that our lives could always be worse now, but the knowledge that nothing could change the present to make it so. The past is in the past, and the present is forever becoming the past. Perhaps the constant I’m trying to describe is time.
But there’s a flip-side to that natural order of things. On some days it seems like there aren’t any rules, and what you’d like to happen never seems to come to pass, and you feel like believing in some ordering of things is just a way to drive yourself mad. Maybe you tell yourself that there was no way you deserve the punishment you’ve received, or that life must be absurd and meaningless. And there we hypocritize and condemn ourselves, because we are no better than an animal that is driven by it’s appetites and that merely goes where the sun shines, and we cling on both to our order and our chaos and claim that we believe in both at the same time while holding ourselves to nothing in principle.
I suppose there’s a natural order to things, in and of that explanation. There’s an unknowability to life that only matures with experience and only bears it’s fruits with time. I cannot claim to know that it is, in fact, a natural order. But it feels appropriate to suppose on a blog that it is probably the case. That’s a part of it’s unknowable charm.
For what feels like the first time in months (and probably was) I had work. I prepared a presentation over twenty or so hours, practiced for another five, mentally prepared to re-enter the respectable world, and put on a new button-up shirt. A bit of order.
I arrived a day late to a very nice university campus. I paid a taxi driver to take me two miles to the place I thought I would be staying, then walked another mile to the actual building. I corrected the translation of “organism” to “orginization” on a reception document, got my room key, showered, and met a very bright NASA employee who bowled about twice as well as I did and likely could run twice my mile time too. I had a lovely dinner where I chatted with a former astronaut who had a fondness for rocks, the Puget Sound, Russian, and a book called Station Eleven that I will have to read someday I’m feeling down. The next day I spent helping very bright students with how they would deliver their hackathon apps to judges, and gave a presentation on presentation.
I met university professors, PHD students, astronauts, engineers, and hackers who all outpaced my scientific knowledge by no factor less than three. I felt hopelessly out of my depth stuttering in Arabic amongst tri- and quadrilingual polyglots. I frequently asked to have simple words repeated to me, and got teased at least as much as I deserved.
I never felt out of my depth. I never felt that I was being excluded, or forgotten, or ignored. In fact, for the first time since I have arrived in Morocco, I felt that my contributions were actually appreciated, instead of being waved aside or passed by as too foreign to fit in. I felt that the work I did was genuinely regarded, appropriately criticized, and honestly appraised. Students came to me asking for more personalized help after my presentation. Advice I gave was often listened to and respected, and when the students who did not trust my judgement were met with difficulty, they came to me afterwards asking where they went wrong. Throughout the weekend, I felt like I was doing the job I was sent here to do.
And then I got back to my house. And I walked inside and it smelled like the mold from a staircase that had not been cleaned since I last washed it, before the movers carried my upstairs neighbor’s furniture up and down it four times through this lonely building in which only I lived now. I opened my apartment door and spotted the roaches with their feet in the air, and I glanced at that always-closed door to the second bedroom which contained the bed-bugs from when I first moved in. For the next day, I felt that sense that I was somewhere on the extremes of that emotional spectrum of order, between realizing that things would never change and reeling from the whiplash of the fall back to reality I had just experienced.
After last weekend I think I better understand the natural order of things, and how the world seems to ask more from you when you need help the most. I think I understand the pointlessness of the Peace Corps’ mission, the absurdity of my presence in a town that honestly wishes I had not come, and the ignorant lie that someone belongs over four thousand miles from their family so they can work towards a goal no one believes in anymore. I think, after last weekend, I understand what I’m feeling.
