UKRAINE AND ME (PAINFUL CONTRAST)
In 9 days I will be driven on a Sunday afternoon to the Asheville Airport and get on one flight and then another and at breakfast time will take the metro to Montmartre and by mid afternoon will be sleeping off jet lag in Hotel Tim. Then a couple of days later will shift to my Airbnb and spend a quiet month walking around Paris. Yesterday I had lunch with Betty Holden and her daughter Mary, a former student of mine, now a mother of four adult children, who lives in Paris. I learned about her life and about Paris. It seems almost impossible that I am in Swannanoa on a gloomy Friday afternoon and will suddenly in two weeks be in Paris with nothing to do but walk around and eat croissants.
But it seems even more unreal that while I am sitting here comfortably or soaking in Paris life that people all over Ukraine, who were a month ago living the same humdrum routine life that I lead here, are curled up together in a huge state theater which is then blown to bits with only 150 of 1000 so far brought out alive.
What I am struck by is chance. I can stand outside myself and am very aware that I was born American in India, but born American and male and pinkish white. Even the reason that I am in Swannanoa is by chance, my marriage was by chance, my conception was by chance. It is chance that places me in Swannanoa about to fly to Paris rather than being in a bombed theater in Ukraine. I didn’t choose my circumstances or have control over them, they just happened to me. My life just happened to me by chance as the lives of the people in the theater just happened to them.
The more I think about the strangeness of my own chance passage through life the more I am feeling the huge discrepancy between how each of us makes our individual way through life and the way that we make our way through life as a part of one tribe or another, starting with our own family and extending out to other people in our culture whose values we learn as we grow up and then extending further to the realization that there are other cultures very different from our own, that the culture we feel is most real is just one of many.
Our individual passage is one passage and our group passage can be very different and yet we live both at the same time.
The people in Kyiv or Mariupol, which is being blown to bits, were living lives as ordinary and as routine as my life in Swannanoa just a month ago. Each of them is trying to make their way along as best they can. And yet they are caught in the swirling tides of Russian nationalism and Ukrainian nationalism and both NATO defensiveness and Russian defensiveness. And of course people in Swannanoa are caught in American nationalism or caught in MAGA return to traditional values and yet as Americans we also share cultural values, even values we are not conscious of.
So what I am trying to be aware of and to separate out is the degree to which I move through life driven by unconscious inner drives and made alive by opening up to the world in certain ways as an individual and the the degree to which I am happily immersed in or painfully feeling immobilized or suffocated by the cultural conventions in which I move. From my perspective it seems to me that each of us has individual ways of opening up and responding to the world that make us feel very alive and are threatened by things that immobilize or suffocate us. And this is often supported by the conventions of the larger groups—family, society, culture, education—but often blocked by these same cultural conventions. Part of the reason that I have felt the need to travel out of the United States all of my life, probably averaging once a year for my lifetime, is because after a short tim American cultural values seem immobilizing and suffocating and I need to escape them for a while. I will have great trouble standing with my hand over my heart when the national anthem plays at the NCAA tournament games I am attending tomorrow. When I have a choice between a month in Swannanoa and a month in Paris, I am choosing Paris. I don’t want to stay in Paris for a long time but I do need to escape from Swannanoa and American cultural values for a while. Then I’ll be happy to stay in Swannanoa for another two or three months before I need to travel again. That is my own passage with unlimited possibilities. But it is my passage and the one that I have to make.
Part of my unease is that I have possibilities that other people in the world don’t have and that some people, many, many people, most people are constrained in so many ways or are either struggling to survive with no opportunities or are in great fear for their lives. So while I stew endlessly about what makes me feel most alive and choose the things that do, other people have no choices at all and are under extreme pressure just to survive.
(To be continued tomorrow)
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 