reality bites?

as we rode home from the first day of staff retreat last monday, which resembled week zero junior counselor training at st. olaf, a new staff member asked me how i ended up in india. “i’d always wanted to live in india, it was this draw…” i said in a dreamy tone that highlighted the now-ridiculous romanticism i had for years attributed to a place i had never been. another friend, who had been here for a year or two, greeted my pronouncement with laughter, and i soon followed suit, losing my breath from amusement.

my love for a country i had never visited is hard to explain after almost a year of indian realities. brushing my teeth with tapwater. the oogling eyes of indian men. how things are never dry and the skies are never sunny for the 2 to 3 months of monsoon. these unidealized truths are only possible through experience. and, it seems, one of the primary stimuli for experiences is the our romanticized views of what something will be. it’s a simple yet thorny truth that we spend our lives planning, preparing, hoping for things that we have never truly experienced. we dream about seeing exotic places or becoming whatever it is we predict will satiate our passions. the future becomes a bed of idealized possibilities, awaiting realization. but, really, we have no idea what it will be like. instead we base decisions on the images of beautiful colors of saris or the brilliant white of the taj mahal against the blue sky brought to us by the lonely planet and national geographic that seem to instill a blind love of the unknown. ultimately, i am thankful for both—the uninformed idealized understanding and the realties of experience.

on my flight back from japan i was reading “innocence” by ruth prawer jhabvala in the new yorker…

“he said that we lived in an india that had been invented in the nineteenth century by german professors, and that, by keeping our eyes fixed on mystical and mythical abstractions, we failed to look down at the earth and the people crowding it. it was only, he said, when something unpleasant happened to us—a sickness, or some fat shopkeeper cheating us, or a youth groping us on a bus—it was only then that we recognized that we were living in a real place, in a city like any other; and at once our noble, our spiritual india was degraded into a country of thievery and lechery.”

ultimately, it’s unfair to identify a place too simply with the glowing lonely planet pictures and too negatively filled with the mundane realities of day-to-day life. and, in the end, the only complete definitions of places are seen with a sense of romance coupled with the commonplace nature of actuality.