Restlessness

I’m getting restless. In mind and body. I enjoy my work and my life here in Micronesia, but something has begun to stir inside me. I flow along in my island existence and try to savor every tropical moment, but a feeling is building up that needs to be released. My teaching is fulfilling and I have plenty of other projects to keep me busy, but my mind is spinning abstract webs of adventurous thought.  Its as if a slumbering Tasmanian devil is slowly awakening inside of me and starting to twitch. Pretty soon he is gonna explode in a frenzy of wild activity. I want to break out of my regular pattern of things and explore more of the fabulous possibilities in our world. I want to do. I want to see. I want to go. I want to experience.

This is kind of ironic, because this is the same feeling that motivated me to disengage from the standard path of middle class Americans and blaze my own trail of life. I loved my life in America, but I wasn’t content with simply going along with the average plan of living. Working in an office cubicle during the day, watching TV at night, and drinking a few beers on weekends can be a great life for many people; but for me it seems like a claustrophobic cage. Contrary to most successful people, I strive to avoid stability, schedules, and regular habits. I want each day to be a new and novel experience full of interesting and unknown possibilities. I don’t like to know what I will be doing next week or next month. This doesn’t mean that I don’t plan things, that is an inescapable tendency of the human species. Our enlarged frontal lobes in our brain give us the ability to imagine the future, and no matter how hard we try we can’t stop from doing it. I think I actually have an especially good skill at creating elaborate and efficient plans, but I only use that ability when it is necessary. It is one of the things that has allowed me to be very successful at most things that I have done in my life. But I don’t want to plan everything because spontaneity is sometimes a more creative innovator and exciting executor than imagination. I want my future to be varied, mysterious and changeable.

I think the reason that this restlessness has begun to creep into my life is that my life has once again taken on a fairly regular routine. The novelty and weirdness of living in a foreign country has worn off and I don’t feel like I am on a daily adventure anymore. I spend hours reading books that take my mind on strange journeys across time and space that light fires in my belly. My mental list of things I want to see and do is growing exponentially. And I actually plan on doing these things, not just dreaming about them.

My body is also restless. Mainly because I do a lot of resting. The suffocating heat and consistent rain make it difficult and wearisome to do much of anything. Sometimes I do local work like pounding breadfruit or chopping wood, but mostly I just sit around like everybody else. I play volleyball nearly every single day. However, volleyball is only slightly above golf and backgammon in its level of athletic activity. I can play 2 hours of volleyball and barely break a sweat. We play on a rocky and muddy sliver of a pathway with 6 people on each team. I do some jumping and shuffling of the feet, but there is only a little exertion of strength and speed. I want to use my muscles and push my body to its physical limits. Island volleyball, occasional pushups and whittling sticks don’t provide the activity that I’m looking for.

As I mentioned before, I try to avoid living in a mentally contrived future, but recently, thoughts of post-Peace Corps life have been running circles in my head. I don’t know what life holds for me when I am finished with this stint in the pacific. Probably some travel, some school and some work. But who knows. In actuality, I don’t want to know. I just want to plunge into the uncertainty of life and see where it takes me. This may seem like a reckless attitude, but my thoughts and actions are far from reckless. Living a life of freedom and unpredictability does not imply recklessness. It simply allows for the possibility of experiencing the world to the fullest. As JRR Tolkien once said, “Not all those who wander are lost”