Life at the Extremes

It's Midnight, aren't all of the best blog posts written at midnight? (that's debatable, I believe)

Talked with my friend Z and Ali tonite, about family, and distance, and our desire to experience other cultures and places. This was a teary conversation, like many of the ones I've had lately. The epiphany came when I saw how the lack of the mundane here made life nearly unbearably. Just like how last week I talked with Serena about how the interesting is not the same as the good, and the good is not the same as the interesting, I see that being here it's unadulterated life. What I mean by that, is just like what Alfred Hitchcock said about drama, how it's life with the boring parts taken away.

Living in a new culture, you put yourself in a situation where nothing can be taken for granted. Or you can take things for granted, but only at your own peril! That's when the biggest burns and faux pas's happen. So it's like the veneer of the usual disappears completely, and so the thing that is left is the sore, tender part of life. And so this allows everything to be felt more strongly, the good and the bad. Everything becomes interesting, the good and the bad. And when we crank up the knob we have on the force of this life, 'our volume goes up to 11', then the most serene moments become nearly intolerably because they are so extremely serene, the most beautiful becomes nearly intolerably because they are so achingly beautiful, the horrible moments are equally intolerable because they are so utterly horrible. A walk down the road to get the mail is not the thirty second exercise I did last year in my pijamas, but it becomes a sojourn onto a planet holding continual surprises. The unknown awaits at every turn, the bizarre behind every palm, new flavors in each bite. And it's too much to take, the best and the worst equally bruising our bodies and damaging our souls, with our only hope residing in the belief that another day or another six months will find us rearranged into a more durable presence, hoping to find a new normal.

My epiphany? Hell, Ironman was a walk in the park compared to this! Doing something like that stretches you thin enough to discover new aspects of your personality, but this is the opposite, and is in fact much tougher: you don't discover new aspects of your personality, but rather you keep pulling until it pulls into several little pieces. And your personality, the person you were now reduced to small grains of sand, suffers the onslaught of the constant winds, until at last a sand dune--composed of the combined experience of you and the many other Americans and Moroccans that guide you through this new land--arises that feels to your feet as if you are running on something as hard as concrete. A sand dune created from the force of the wind blowing in the same pattern for years, that's what you do. But if the wind shifts, like it always does, then the sand is lifted as easily as if it were never glued together to begin with. Because, it wasn't, it never was.

Sitting here now, remembering how I cried yesterday watching the movie CROSSING BORDERS, not when the Americans are there complaining about not feeling life strongly enough, not having enough compassion, but instead I cried when I saw a Moroccan woman calling her mother, asking her mom to 'smH li' forgive her for not having been more thankful for so much opportunity. And I cried because I knew those words and have said them and internalized them already. That affected me the most, hearing and understanding those words, which cut to the quick of me.

Each night the past week I've been happy walking back from the Panorama, buying an egg sandwich from the man across from the hamburger store. It was good because I walked up to the stand, where there is arranged the ingredients for these amazing hobs bid sandwiches, half a dozen little bowls holding rice, potatoes, onion, olives, french fries, ketchup mayo and picante sauce. Egg sandwiches in a round piece of bread, all of that stuffed inside, yum! But it was nice to be there, to talk to the man and feel comfortable being there, down the hill from the mosque, speaking Arabic and hungry for my sandwich. Even better was to use the words " bahl dima" which means "like always", como siempre, comme d'habitude.

Now I'm sitting here, listening as the Moroccan language teachers around me are discussing Twilight, which is Fatima's favorite movie. Last night we taught them to play the role game, Mafia, where you have to find who got the Mafia card, who got the Police and Doctor cards, which townspeople are suspicious and must be killed. It was fun to wake up and at breakfast, to have one of them ask me, "Ben, are you the mafia?" . It was a classic moment in my life.

That's all! Goodnite.