Epilogue - What Everything is Made Of

The sun bakes the mountains of Macedonia into a blue haze off in the distance. Many kilometers behind me, it shines peacefully down over a wide expanse of fields rife with plants waving in the gentle breeze.

Yesterday was St. Peter's Day, the traditional beginning of the harvest season in Bulgaria. It is a beautiful, blazing summer morning. I was up at dawn, packing the last of my things, making sure I had forgotten to pack nothing except what few negative memories I had of my year in Bulgaria and my trepidation at the most challenging of journeys I was about to embark on.

Out in the fields of the great, beautiful, mountain-rimmed expanse of the Sofian Plain, perhaps, a few women in traditional costumes have gone out to reenact the ritual of the beginning of the harvest, singing their mournful duets back and forth to each other, the ritual an empty vestige of what once was, a defiant survivor of an age past.

We reap what we sow. Life has a way of taking what we choose to pour into it--energy, apathy, joy, sorrow, defiance, resignation, love, hatred, passion, interest--turning it around and backward and head over heels, blending it into a mystic elixir, and presenting it back to us as the cumulative content of our life. The last two months have been painful and trying for me, but they have not diminished--in fact, perhaps they have enhanced--the experience I've had this year. It has been a year of growth and trials and discovery and accomplishment. I have experienced more than my share of twists and turns, which have been, perhaps, fitting for a year spent in a foreign land as the result of a lark and a dumbly blind eye to fear. I have tried, at every turn, to spend my time well, to make the most of what this year has been--an opportunity - an opportunity to discover and meet people and change myself and become things that I have always wanted to become--and I have been repaid in kind. I have begun to see that the content of life is, to an extent, self-determining.

Nothing in this world has value except for that which we assign it. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about mundane things, like money or gold or houses or water or cars or trees or air. It is the use or the consequences of all these things--and how we interpret them--that determines their value. Things that we want and need are valuable; things without which life would be little different than it is now are not.

Life is about people. One thing that is valuable in this world is the relationships that we forge with our fellow Travelers In Life. Not to delve into a series of wretched platitudes, but human relationships are the closest things we have in this universe to something that is intrinsically valuable. Knowing other people allows you to know yourself. Loving other people allows you to love yourself. Finding and meeting and discovering other people opens up a world of self-discovery that can change your life. And the greater the challenge it is to do so, in whole and in part, the greater the rewards that lie in it are. We reap what we sow. Relationships, like Life In General, are largely self-determining.

I have been many people this year. We are all many people over the course of our lives, and we will continue to be so, on and on until our precious time on earth runs out. We live our lives under many different identities as time marches forward, and we see the world through many different lenses as we learn and grow as people. This year, I have lived through many different stages of my life and had many different relationships with many different people. Shakespeare, in one of his most overquoted gifts to the English language, said "All the world's a stage,/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances,/and one man in his time plays many parts." The last line of that, though it is the one that is most often overlooked within this torrent of insight into the human condition, is, to me, the most profound and important one. It speaks to the many different roles we all fill, sometimes all at once, and this is of the utmost consequence to our relationships and our personhood.

I found myself, this year, through the vehicle of a titanic, momentous journey, because I had so much searching to do. In the last few months, I have again lost myself a little bit, but the journey I'm about to embark on will be less momentous and less extensive than the one I have just completed because, now that I have already found myself once, and become, at least temporarily, the person that I wanted to be, I have much less searching to do in order to find myself again. The person that I now want to be has changed by degrees from that previous incarnation of my hopes for myself, but the distance between who I am and this new vision of who I need to be in order to be satisfied with myself is much smaller than the one that confronted me previously.

I am ending this year the way I began it - leaving for someplace exotic and exciting and new, someplace about which I know nothing, in order to find myself once more. Travel, it would seem, is a productive way to discover things about the world and about other people and about yourself. Maybe it is the isolation inherent in it - no matter who you may be with, you are far from home, outside of your comfort zone, forced to grapple with your surroundings and to come up with a new identity that will suit you and allow you to cope with a new version of the world around you. That's certainly what I'm prepared for, and my hope is that it will bring me back to a place in which my life is complete and whole and centered and the richness of the world once more hides around every corner, behind every door, beyond every sunrise.

I close my eyes and I'm back there. And there. And there. I think about what this means, and I think it is that I really, truly love LA and that it has genuinely become home. Separated from it by thousands of miles, I can't stop thinking about it, and I suppose, if I am frank with myself, that I haven't this entire year. The urge to run back there, to resume the life that I led, has grown stronger and stronger as the weather in Sofia has converged with that in LA, as I have attempted to repair the cracks that the last couple of months have put in my life, as this year has drawn to a close and the time for leaving has grown ever closer. It was just a year ago that I had to go through the process that I have gone through in the last several weeks, only last year's was much harder. I was a lesser person, and the content of my life had come to a triumphant head, and it was a place of comfort I was leaving. It is easier to leave this place because of what lies ahead and because of the person I have become, but there is still a very big part of me that wants to stay.

It has truly been a privilege to know everyone I've known, gone everywhere I've gone, and done everything I've done this year, and I mean that, sincerely, earnestly, without the saccharine sentiment that typically accompanies these sorts of statements. It has been, above and beyond any of the details and pitfalls and triumphs and personal changes I've gone through in the last 11 months, an overwhelmingly positive year. I have discovered, for the first time, that I have an enormous amount of influence over what happens to me, contained in the simple facet of my attitude towards life and all the situations it has a way of throwing us. We reap what we sow. We drive down the highways of our lives with nothing but our personhood, our ventures, our relationships, our faults, our joys, our loves, our passions, our identities, and all the rest, using them and adapting them and changing them to try to make as much sense as we can out of the Universe.

I will, after some indeterminate amount of time, return to the country that I had the privilege of calling home for the most formative year of my life. And it, and I, and the world will be changed, and I will have to do whatever I can to make sense of those changes.

I will adapt one of the greatest closing monologues in film's history to sign off to you now and for good. So I ask: 

When will I be going back? And who will I be?

Leaving, Again

My bags are on their way to being packed, and my dad and I are hitting the road in about an hour. This is the last time I'll bid farewell to Pennsylvania before I come back to the States for good.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it's been quite difficult for me to go through the mental process of saying goodbye today. The last two times, while they included their share of difficulties, were different, I think partly because my sentimentality at leaving was tempered with the excitement of going. I'll attribute the challenges of doing so this time around to the emotional content of this trip. My brother's wedding on Saturday was beautiful, and it made me happier than I ever would have anticipated to watch him take this leap with his wife, Jenna, and to welcome her into the family.

I suppose what it did was to throw into relief everything that my life has been over the last 6 years. And, to be quite honest, I wasn't expecting that. I hadn't anticipated just how much this would affect me. But: Here I am--a somewhat new man thanks to a dose of new perspective--and things look, from this vantage point, both a bit clearer and a bit more muddled.

Over the last 36 hours or so, I've had to take in a large part of the contents of my life and reassess where I really am. The most immediately direct and powerful result of that process has been my assessment of the relationships I've built over the last 10 years of my life, and how I've prioritized and valued them.

I certainly haven't done so in any kind of egalitarian fashion - nor could I--or should I--have. A part of being human, something I've learned as I've grown up, is that some relationships are, necessarily, more fulfilling, and some more fun, and some more important, and some more difficult, and some more instructional, and some more complex, and some more organic, and some more trying, and some more stable than others. And as we develop them and grow through them, the only healthy thing we can do is to prioritize those that are better for us over those that are less so based on what we feel and what we know at the time. We can do no better than that.

So I've been doing that, and as I've gotten better and better at it, the overall quality of the  relationships that I've cultivated and maintained has--surprise!--risen, and dramatically so.

But what this weekend--and, really, this entire week back at home--has done has been to make me reexamine some of those relationships and to really think about their places in my life. And what I've realized is that I haven't given some of them the energy and time they deserve.

I had an OK life in Pennsylvania before I went off to university. Every adolescent's existence is fraught with self-esteem issues and heartbreak, melodrama, frustration, and tough, painful lessons, and I certainly experienced more than my fair share of those. Overall, though, it could have been a lot worse, and what it did, at the end of the day, was force me to grow. But the time I had after I moved to LA and started my new life was so overwhelmingly positive and happiness-inducing (Though it was, by no means, idyllic or perfect - there was just as much drama in my life during those four years as during my previous four) that I unconsciously tore down and devalued various aspects of my life back in Pennsylvania. In short, my time in LA was so much fun that my former life seemed negative and incomplete by comparison.

And while I can now, with the benefit of hindsight and psychological insight, understand why I mentally denigrated the memories of the first 18 years of my life, I can also now see that it wasn't the healthiest or most judicious thing to do. I had a few relationships back on the East Coast that I, instead of tearing down, should have been building up.

Many of them were with members of my own family. To be sure, some of those relationships were actually served by the introduction of space into them, and have since regrown, stronger and better-adjusted. But at some point during my college years, I think I realized, luckily, that I really missed not having them close by, and this imbued me with something for them--appreciation--that I don't think I had had enough of prior to that. And so the time I spent away from them actually strengthened our relationships in the end.

This happened with my brother. He and I, separated in age by 8 ½ years, were never particularly close, and the fact that we were two totally dissimilar people didn't do anything to mitigate that. But the last 6 years, having thrown my growth process into hyperdrive, have closed the gap between us, and we've also grown more similar to each other as people. Having begun to develop a relationship with him in the past couple of years has been more fulfilling than I had ever thought possible.

I think that's part of the reason why I've been so affected by his getting married. I'm incredibly happy to see him begin his life with Jenna, who is pretty damned excellent herself, and I'm excited, as their family, to share in their household.

I have a lot to think about, coming back to the East Coast in the Fall; in particular, about what I'm going to take with me from LA and what I'll have to leave behind. And in my emotional state this weekend, I remembered something important that I had forgotten: That I have some truly precious things, things from my former life that have endured through all the changes and situations and lessons of the past few years, that I'll be coming back to. And, despite the emotional maelstrom of the last month, that makes me, at my core, happy.

And they lived happily ever after.

 

Bye-bye, Bansko; Zdravei, Sofia

My apologies for the criminal length of time between posts herein - it has been an incredibly busy two-weeks-and-change. So I'll make it up to you in the form of THREE separate posts. Won't this be fun?

While I would love to wax on and on (and on and on) about the last week of FISI, and as much as it merited my potentially doing so, I'm afraid that that would run counter to the interests of my time and your attention span. Nevertheless, I shall wax for a few lines, at least:

The second week of FISI was quite possibly better than the first, despite the still-greater abuses of our collective sleep schedule. Classes this week were Bulgarian Language and Human Rights. Added to the mix were a large (verging on titanic) contingent of MBA students from UMichigan. While I didn't get the opportunity to meet all of them, I did have a few conversations about the school and about their personal experiences. They seemed like an OK bunch for the amount of time they were there, and they--of course--participated in the festivities of the Last Night.

This second week of FISI, I got out into the town of Bansko a wee bit more, and even got over to the neighboring town of Razlog. With the help of my new friend Xristo, I ventured over to the Vivacom store in Bansko to pick out a Bulgarian SIM card; thus, I now have a local number. (A quick aside - The Bulgarian system of phone carriers is depressingly similar to that of the States, in that the three largest providers--MTel, Vivacom, and GloBul--provide something like 98% of the service to the country. Chalk this up as one of a few small ways Europe has disappointed my expectations in the Somebody Out There Must Have A Better System Of __ Than Ours category) It has been a strange feeling going back to working within the confines of a finite (and rather small) number of minutes per month. Call that another perspective-generating experience.

The following day, Xristo and I tested fate and went down to the bus station (na Bulgarski, Avtogarata) to buy a ticket for Razlog. Anticlimactically, the ride took 5 minutes, and it didn't take long for us to find what we had come in search of - the notary. We used this trip to check out a little bit of Razlog, and found that not much was different from Bansko. Satisfied, we returned, and I squandered another beautiful late Bulgarian afternoon attending to the mundane details of my business-oriented life.

Not strictly relevant to the content here, but Xristo and I saw this kitten on the way back from Razlog and OMG LOOK AN ADORABLE LITTLE KITTEN

Well, all good things must come to an end, and before we get to the juice--TMZ be damned--I wanted to offer my little tribute to Bansko, which represented my first interaction with Bulgaria. The town was lovely, picturesque, and really a nice place in every way. The people, I found, were pleasant enough, and imbued with what I'll go out on a limb and call a universal small town citizen quality - that quiet, welcoming aura that, it has been my experience, most citizens of small towns around the world share. Being there for the Jazz Festival was a real plus, and I got to see some really good music take place, for free, a five minute walk from the hotel. I never once felt threatened, or alone--although this sense may have had the most to do with the by-design bonding experience that was FISI--or overwhelmed by a sense of geography or anything else. Beyond that, it's quite difficult to separate out the experiences with my fellow Fulbrighters from my experiences purely with Bansko, so I'll conclude this little tribute by saying that my two weeks there, among Bulgarians, Americans, Those Of Other Nationalities, students, small town citizens, musicians, teachers, colleagues, and friends, were quite pleasant, and just about the best way I could have begun this adventure.

And yes, the Last Night happened, and it was everything that the collective Summer Camp-like energy leading up to it anticipated. The night started out innocuously enough, with an awards ceremony and farewell banquet at the slightly-more-upscale-than-our-host-hotel Hotel Gardenia. After the banquet came dancing, followed by a bout of packing back at our hotel by numerous members of our party who had left preparations for our departure until the last minute. There was a palpable buzz in the air as the clock ticked down those last few hours, and so we decided to do the only thing we could do to fight it - we went to the club.

From L to R: Katelin, Keša (Not the Rapper), Katerina, the Author, Naadiya

L - R: Delvina, Tijana, Melissa

I believe, though without conviction, that this was to Chalga

Aside for some antics afterwards back at the hotel post-club, that effectively did it for the night, and a good thing, too - by that point it was already 3 AM, and--more was the treachery of circumstance--we had to be up, packed, and down to breakfast by 8 AM. And down to breakfast we somehow made it, though none of us had gotten a full night's sleep, some of us staggering across the deadline with 2 hours or less to our coherence's credit. Nevertheless, sleep deprivation or not, it was time to say goodbye (Not the Andrea Bocelli song) to Bansko and to our first taste of Bulgaria.

I could not have been more excited about the trip

FISI was a superb way to begin this long journey. It was functional, practical - we learned some things about how this part of the world works, got acclimated to a new language and culture in a safe environment, surrounded by our peers who knew just as little about them as we did, and got to practice being on our own in a setting in which we weren't really on our own. But perhaps--dare I say it and risk a reprimand from those who organized the thing for the aforementioned serious purposes--more importantly, it was a chance to meet and network (read: party and bond) with peers who are going to end up being, in all likelihood, our primary source of support during what will be, at times, a scary, intimidating year.

So with that, Chapter 1 so ended. To find out what happens in Chapters 2 - ?, read on, dear reader, read on...

On the Eve of Travel

Tomorrow my journey begins. Surprisingly, I don't have a whole lot to say right now, at least not much of substance. Or, nothing that would really capture my feelings adequately.

I've intentionally kept myself busy so that I haven't had time for sentimentality. Let's call it an experiment in coping strategies. Whatever the case may be, my flight leaves in 16 hours. After that, whether or not there have been things left unsaid between me and the Universe At Large, I'll be gone on my journey; committed to the road.

I'm excited to go. Scared. If we want to be honest with each other (And why wouldn't we? We've known each other for a few hours already), I'm probably more scared than excited. Visa issues? Unresolved. Language capabilities? Rudimentary, to be generous. Housing settled? Incompletely. Yet, what else is there for me to do than--to shamelessly plagiarize from an overpopular modern choral anthem--steel myself, take one last breath, and leap?

Much (so much) has been written on the subject of parting and Taking The Next Step, but one piece of literature remains my favorite for its lyricism, its spot-on description of traveling (complete with a truly dark, hard-hitting scene of the wayward traveler, lost and alone) and its ultimately uplifting message of redemption. I apologize, but when I went to choose just a few passages to post, I really couldn't bring myself to cut out any, it's just kind of perfect the way it is. So in its entirety--with my apologies--Oh, the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss:

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself 

any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know. 

And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look’em over with care. 

About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” 

With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, 

you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any 

you’ll want to go down. 

In that case, of course, 

you’ll head straight out of town. 

It’s opener there 

in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen 

and frequently do 

to people as brainy 

and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen, 

don’t worry. Don’t stew. 

Just go right along. 

You’ll start happening too.

OH! THE PLACES YOU'LL GO!

You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers 

who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. 

You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. 

Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. 

Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t.
Because, sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so 

but, sadly, it’s true 

that Bang-ups 

and Hang-ups 

can happen to you.

You can get all hung up 

in a prickle-ly perch. 

And your gang will fly on. 

You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch 

with an unpleasant bump. 

And the chances are, then, 

that you’ll be in a Slump.

And when you’re in a Slump, 

you’re not in for much fun. 

Un-slumping yourself 

is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. 

Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. 

A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! 

Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? 

How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right…

or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? 

Or go around back and sneak in from behind? 

Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, 

for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused 

that you’ll start in to race 

down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace 

and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, 

headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place…

...for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go 

or a bus to come, or a plane to go 

or the mail to come, or the rain to go 

or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow 

or waiting around for a Yes or No 

or waiting for their hair to grow. 

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite 

or waiting for wind to fly a kite 

or waiting around for Friday night 

or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake 

or a pot to boil, or a Better Break 

or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants 

or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. 

Everyone is just waiting.

NO! 

That’s not for you!

Somehow you’ll escape 

all that waiting and staying. 

You’ll find the bright places 

where Boom Bands are playing. 

With banner flip-flapping, 

once more you’ll ride high! 

Ready for anything under the sky. 

Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!

Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! 

There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. 

And the magical things you can do with that ball 

will make you the winning-est winner of all. 

Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be, 

with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t. 

Because, sometimes, they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times 

you’ll play lonely games too. 

Games you can’t win 

‘cause you’ll play against you.

All Alone!
Whether you like it or not, 

Alone will be something 

you’ll be quite a lot.

And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance 

you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. 

There are some, down the road between hither and yon, 

that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.

But on you will go 

though the weather be foul. 

On you will go 

though your enemies prowl. 

On you will go 

though the Hakken-Kraks howl. 

Onward up many 

a frightening creek, 

though your arms may get sore 

and your sneakers may leak. 

On and on you will hike. 

And I know you’ll hike far 

and face up to your problems 

whatever they are.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, 

as you already know. 

You’ll get mixed up 

with many strange birds as you go. 

 So be sure when you step. 

Step with care and great tact 

and remember that Life’s 

a Great Balancing Act. 

Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. 

And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)

KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!

So…

be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray 

or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O’Shea, 

you’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!