“The purpose of
life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and
without fear for newer and richer experience.” –Eleanor Roosevelt
Hi all
I went to a
party at an embassy apartment last night to watch the fireworks and celebrations
marking the end of Ramadan and start of Eid ul-Fitr aka Idul Fitri aka Lebaran.
I mention the embassy apartment bit mainly because the luxury apartment came
with one of the best verandas of all times, so we could all crowd out there at
watch the city celebrate from 25 stories up. Jakarta is relatively calm this
time of year because a few (10? 15?) million people leave the city to go back
to their hometowns, whether ancestrally or where they were actually raised up,
to celebrate Lebaran. Which is a lovely treat traffic-wise for those of us that
stay behind. (The threats of bar firebombings from a militant group of thugs
only puts a minor inconvenience to things if you know where else to go.) It
also made the celebrating last night manageable rather than the chock-o-block
mess of traffic it could have been.
Jakarta from up
high and especially at night can be quite beautiful, both much greener and even
brighter and more sparkly than you imagine, and with fireworks of varying
complexity and size going off as far as the eye can see against the sound drop
of cars honking, the occasional bus full of revelers with drums, and the
chanting from a competing number of mosque loudspeakers, it was a striking
scene.
Being here for
Lebaran and yet being quite content to be observing but not in the celebrations
and not to have any particular invitation to someone’s family events to attend
over the next 2 days to eat mounds of food and beg forgiveness for any
wrongdoings I may have committed over the past year are both cause for
reflection for me, or rather they feed into ongoing reflections: on what I’m
doing in Indonesia (think, what in the world am I doing here? not, what do I do
here for a living)?, on the nature of being an expat, on the draw of living abroad.
The expat issue is a bit complicated for me, coming
from a background of work and experiences in which being “expat” was something
to look down on with more than a hint of disdain. Yet those previous experiences
were chosen very purposefully because I wanted to experience those cultures,
and were relatively short-term and time bound, and were structured as immersion
experiences in which my substantive daily interactions happened largely with
people from the place that I was staying and in their language. On the other
hand I ended up in Indonesia largely on accident, without any particular
passion for the culture or society and without any particular end in sight to
the time here, and in environments that are dominated by other
foreigners.
I do need to be
able to operate in the social context, which I think I can do fairly well even in
remote villages and in meetings with minor and not-so-minor government officials
and the like; and I need to have a support network, the current state of which
I’m fairly contented with. If that support network happens to be mostly other
foreigners, that is a problem only philosophically. (It should be noted that
even in my times as a volunteer, or doing field research, or studying abroad,
or in the Peace Corps I relied on American and European friends for miniature
escapes, to be able to be myself among people who more or less understand me as
an integrated whole without needing explanation or defense of bits and pieces.)
What I realized
I have done though, in being content with just those basic operational minimums, is
shut myself off from the possibilities for adventure even here in Jakarta. And I
define adventure in a very broad way: trying the unknown I suppose, or taking
risks, or generally pushing into uncharted territory however small. For
instance, one of the conversations I floated into last night was comparing
horror stories and tips about using Jakarta public transportation and realized
I’d never ridden a Kopaja mainly because I didn’t feel like dealing with the unknowns (how much does it
cost, what are the routes, when do you pay, who do you pay, how do you signal
to stop) especially since a taxi ride is a fully known quantity and is still quite cheap (though granted at least 10x more expensive!) Or, before my month off in the US, an old
friend from my neighborhood growing up happened to be in Jakarta and I barely
had anything to tell her about how to spend her couple days here, like for
instance the location of Jakarta’s oldest ice cream parlor that my roommate pointed
her in the direction of. Examples like these are partly the old
you-don’t-see-what’s-in-front-of-you and also largely because I’m avoiding
dealing with the unknown and thus resigning myself – confining myself -- to the max. 2 to 3 degrees of
separation among friends and the same usual bars and restaurants and Saturdays
spent at home or at the mall.
In that regard
then, what is the point of living here? I can’t believe I’ve “turned” enough
that it’s just the relatively higher standard of living that I can afford, or a stubborn resistance to a quiet predictable life path, or the constant exposure to extremely bright and
motivated people, or the possibilities to work on projects that would be way above my
league if I was on some career ladder somewhere. Although those things are nice enough, certainly
I could create similar circumstances a few time zones closer to my nearest and
dearest if I aimed for them, and in any case as I was smacked in the face with
this summer there are equally appealing -- though
very different -- plusses to living closer to home.
My sister thinks that
if I move back home, I’ll get antsy and it won’t stick. And maybe she’s right, there’s
certainly that precedent in my life. Though my recent aversion to adventure
makes me think that any such antsy-ness would be a case of false
grass-is-always greener. I’ll be faced very soon with a question of “what’s
next?”. I’d like to answer that question with something more substantial than
a 4-month work contract, which at this point has become a cop out way for me to
avoid making real decisions about the direction my life is going to take. So for the time while I do still have definite commitments keeping me in Jakarta, I need to start making the
most of being here. I need to rediscover if I really am adventurous, or if instead I’m resigned to the caricature expat role
that I used to look down on, resignedly putting up with the sacrifices that come with living far
from home while not attempting to inhabit or experience the place that I do live.
I’ll take the
Kopaja to the ice cream parlor next weekend and report back.
Mohon maaf lahir
dan batin: forgive my wrongdoings
xo
M
