Self-Aggrandizement

On Halloween, I read a letter on Salon's advice column that struck a rather familiar chord. In the letter, a 23 year-old Yale graduated describes returning home to care for her dying father. After he passed, she found herself "stuck" in her small hometown, in a relationship with a local doctor and consumed by the malaise of her situation. She wants to travel and pursue her career. I empathized with her because her situation seems to be precisely the opposite of mine.

[By the way, has everyone upgraded to Firefox 2.0 yet? I think the new version is great!]

I decided to post a response to the letter. At the time, I was the second person to post a comment, thanks in large part to having opposite hours as America. They've received about 30 letters since then, and the columnist Cary Tennis picked five to be Editor's Choices, one of which was mine (hence the red star). I wanted to share with you my opinions on her situation:

Perennial Movement

The moon is always changing, yet it returns to where it was with a regular rhythm. There are many small arcs in our lives, yet our life is also one large arc with a pattern reflected in the lives of the rest of us. It's easy to know that this has all happened before, but difficult to accept that it will only happen to you once.

I'm also 23, and fortunately a number of years ago my father dodged prostate cancer. He beat it with surgery, and now he recently retired from psychiatry. He sends emails about how his joints hurt, and he feels hungover in the morning when he doesn't drink the night before. His writing style has changed from reading my brother's and my travel blogs.

I'm from a small(ish) town. I think fifty thousand people in the middle of Louisiana counts, though it's probably bigger than where you're from. I went to Rice, and I spent my summers alone in the New Mexican mountains. Houston certainly felt like the whole world compared to where I grew up. That is, before I went to Beijing.

We are similar in many ways, but I feel we are on opposite trajectories. Now I am teaching in Western China, near Tibet. I wish I was home with my family. I want to be stuck in my hometown, piddling away the afternoons in a canoe or writing for our two-bit paper.

Cary is right. Take your time. You can't speed up the hurt, and sometimes it will hurt less before it hurts more again. Dostoevsky says it will become the dull pain of joy. In Swingers, Ron Livingston says one day you will wake up and miss the pain when it's gone.

I feel the pressure to run back to school, too. I can't justify why I want to help people on the other side of the planet when there is so much pain near my home. I lived in New Orleans for the first half of 2006. It was a painful joy. My grades say I should search for the top. My heart tells me to dig my toes between the roots.

After being at Yale, must you get back to the centre of the world? Is there a way to bridge the gap? Cary composed a small fiction of your life. In your stories, I can see the fiction of my own.

Yours,

Daniel Smith

dantsmith@gmail.com, khamabiding.blogspot.com

"Your past joys and sorrows are like drawings on water: No trace of them remains. Don't run after them!...

Your future projects and plans are like nets cast in a dry riverbed: They'll never bring what you want. Limit your desires and aspirations!..."

-Gyalse Rinpoche, 14th Century