Initial thoughts on Thailand

The other side of the world. So far from everything and everyone I know. And I love it. 

At first the transition to Thailand wasn't easy. I stepped out of the airport tram and into the street and was almost toasted by a scooter within the first 30 seconds. Turns out the they drive on the other side of the street here. Look right, then left before crossing ;)

My head was buzzing for the first 24 hours just trying to comprehend the difference in the pace and structure of life. But now that it's been five days, I'm beginning to lean fully into it (going for all the crazy street food I can, attending a Thai boxing match alone, letting Thai kids play with my beard, etc) and I love every second of it. 

As is my blogging tradition when entering a new culture, I try to lay out three key observations and dive into them. While by no means representative of the entire culture (how could it be?) and not meant to stereotype in any way, here's what's been most striking to me thus far in my first far-east experience. I'll do my best not to sound TOO much like Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai when describing his eastern culture observations. But no promises. 

True gentleness and kindness comes from within

I think one of my least favorite aspects of Americans is their volatility and capacity for rage. Because we live in a country where expectations are so high, life is fast-paced and our "I-deserve-this complex" permeates our being, Americans just always seem like they're on the verge of exploding. Only when you separate yourself geographically from this mentality do you realize just how unattractive it is and how taxing it all can be. We burn ourselves down to nothing and at the end of the day what is it all for?

Thailand seems composed of gentle spirits. Every time I walk down a street, sure I get the stares, but I also get the smiles. The welcoming faces. And people willing to help me, even if there's no money involved (tourism is a massive industry here and is the driving catalyst for most street-side dialogue with locals). This gentleness begins inwardly and radiates outwardly through the eyes. And it informs the way Thai people treat one another. Not once have I seen a Thai person raise their voice in anger at another person. I see tough love in places but at the end of the day, it is still love. 

People here appear to exist independently of time and through nature. Nothing seems forced. All is in its place and appears content where it is. Do people here dream? I'm sure. Do people here yearn for more? Absolutely. But it seems clear to me they don't let these dreams and hope for their future keep them from enjoying the present. Read that sentence again. 

An inner peace exists here that I yearn to one day achieve. While we can't change the values and pace of our culture, we can cultivate inward stillness. We can focus on giving ourselves and others breaks. We can breathe deeper and appreciate more. As much as our culture composes our DNA, we are not slaves to it. We can still lead with love. 

Your work is your passion and your identity.

My first day here I spent in the markets of Bangkok. I saw a flurry of merchants, cooks, friends, dogs, flies, vegetables, sauces, bins, supplies, shirts, signs, and humidity all mashed together in a way I'd never seen before. People running to and fro, deep-fried fish and insects here, Bangkok novelties hawked a few feet to the left and a pack of scooter boys having a smoke a few feet further. No barricades between operations - just a shared space where everybody knows everybody and anybody asks anybody for anything. With the proximity and interplay of business, there were no barriers. Nobody can wall up and do their own thing. Nobody can create a service that trumps all others and forces the mom and pop shop out of town. Everybody instead leans on everybody else, thrives as a result of their interconnectedness and because a rising tide lifts all boats, nobody bitches and moans - they just put their heads down and do their work because that's how they get by and how they support their families and the greater community. 

Perhaps as a result of the shared business experience, there's an extreme ownership over one's work. Your trade is your passion. Your craft is your lifeblood. Your work puts food on the table. And what was even more intriguing? There's joy in one's work. How do I know this? Well if you compare just the amount of smiles and laughs Thai people have when they're doing their work against the number of smiles and laughs Americans share when they work, I have a feeling the result would be sad for us. Because of close proximity to other businesses, because your colleagues are your friends and because your work is such an integral part of your life, work seems actually enjoyable. I doubt many Thai people feel depressed on Sunday nights before having to work Monday mornings. While work is work and it needs to happen no matter the culture, there's something to be said about how work needn't be a dread or a bore - it can be a haven and a purpose.

I fully realize I'm taking surface-level observations and making deep speculations. I know that. And I know that just because my foreign ass saw something for thirty minutes one day while in a foreign country, doesn't mean it's true. But observing a culture only becomes truly useful when you can stack the observations against yourself, your own life and your own culture. And that's all I aim to do here.

If you can smile, you're winning

It's incredible the power a smile can have. Smiles and laughter - the power they have over a person and the change they can create in communities are the reasons I want to dedicate my life to comedy in all its forms. In Thailand there's no comedy theater with shows. But there's comedy everywhere. The same joy that opens people up in the audience of a live comedy show back home opens people up on the streets here. The exploration of universal truths that break down barriers back home is a force here. And even though I've only been here five days, I've smiled and laughed an incredibly high number of times. When walking through the streets of America, people keep to themselves, they have places to be and they silo themselves off from others. Here people have time to look around, they make an effort to meet the eyes and they know it doesn't take much to make a smile. 

I've experienced smiles that welcome me. I've experienced smiles because "that tall white man's head just does not fit into this train car". I've experienced smiles because I've spent the better part of the day playing around in a cafe with a two year old named Kia who always finds new ways to play with his bag of chips. He's sitting on my lap as I write this and he keeps pjuaying wdrith theeeee k3yboorde. Maybe it's because I've grown so used to meeting new people in my four months of travel that I'm able to relax and smile more easily. But I notice this same smile-off between locals and other travelers. Life is often crazy here, it's not always easy and the economic disparity between groups may be the highest I've ever seen. But just because you are at Point A and you need to get to Point B, it doesn't mean you can't smile in between. Smile more.

Without further ado, here's Kia:

Self-Analysis Post Europe

This entry is more introspective in nature than the other culturally-focused ones. I typically tend to wait to write an entry until I have some pressing realization or cultural bemusement that I feel compelled to share. One that I can expound on fully and share as an experience that is illuminating to me and hopefully enlightening for you. But as I've been on the road for nearly four months, I find that one of my greatest challenges has been just processing all that has happened. So here's a post that has allowed me to reflect while simultaneously shedding light on the maelstrom of thoughts and feelings that so frequently invade my brain.

As I roll into my final day in Europe, I'm overwhelmed by the memories I've made in Spain, Portugal, Italy and for a single afternoon, Switzerland. I've seen a myriad of mankind's most impressive art and architecture ranging from the Sistine Chapel and canals of Venice to motion-activated escalators. I've reunited with many of my Euro-dwelling friends and was overwhelmed by their hospitality. I've eaten mindblowingly flavorful food that is steeped in tradition. I've retraced the footsteps of saints and geniuses alike. And I've worn some variation of the same five articles of clothing every damn day.

Through my travels up to this point, I feel like I've grown as a person and as a human organism. I've been pushed out of my comfort zone a million times. I've been forced to acclimate to new environment after new environment. I've made a fool of myself like never before and I found out that, much to my chagrin, my mother is still very capable of massively embarrassing me. I know it's going to take me years to wrap my mind around everything that's happening to me in this very moment. And that's okay - it's okay to live now and learn later.

Allow me to officially begin my lengthy pontification with the point of endless independence.

It's rare in life that we have full autonomy. Most aspects of life that we so cherish also serve as restraints - family, relationships, jobs, hobbies, communities, etc. While these things provide a sense of purpose and belonging, they also dictate our behavior. We live for them while living under them.

When you're in full travel mode and your itinerary is blown wide open, you only have two things that dictate your behavior - time and money. Everything else (within reason and lifestyle preference obviously) is up to you.

The resulting freedom can be euphoric - one realizes the endless possibilities of a single day and life finally feels completely lived, fully experienced and incredibly interesting. A hint of this feeling I experienced while traveling through the Balkans five years ago and it's the same feeling that catapulted me into this adventure of a lifetime I find myself in the middle of today. You've escaped social tethers! You are your own man! You can be the person you want to be and capitalize fully on the wanderlust you've felt at your office job for the last several years! This feeling is intoxicating and I keep having these freak out moments of clarity where my heart races and I just have to stop and tell myself "You're really here. This is really happening. My God."

While euphoric, this freedom can also lead to massive loneliness. You're floating around the globe, carried on the wings of lightness and though you can do anything you mean nothing. You have nobody waiting for you to come home today, you have nobody to report to, you have no responsibilities of any sort, your presence has little impact on the locals who oftentimes see you as just another fly in the meat and you exhaust yourself hoping exposure to the exotic will fill the dearly missed void of the familiar. You exhaust yourself so much that it takes a night of stomach-wrenching agony in Madrid and a subsequent 36 hours of fever sweats and horizontal positions until you finally accept the fact that your body just. needs. to. rest.

While there are a million little choices to make each day, they are all made under the colossal shadow of needing to further your life purpose and you question whether seeing any of this new stuff and meeting these new people will actually make any real difference in your life. You can't help feel that all the other people trying to make a living producing comedy are back in the U.S. working their asses off at their dream while you're out here bumming around like a ascetic.

As an attempt at piecing these thoughts together, allow me to say that I believe true travel really cuts to the heart of your humanity. While you feel so many things - some amazing, some terrible - you realize that this is what living is all about. It's the good and the bad. It's the pretty and the ugly. It's the lightness and the weight. It's the exhaustive list of additional dualities of which we habitually place ourselves somewhere in the spectrum.

When my thoughts are at their cloudiest or my raison d'être seems indistinguishable, there is only one thing I can do: hope. I need to hope that everything I'm experiencing now will make sense later. I need to hope that everyone back home still loves me and hasn't entirely forgotten about me. I need to hope that the choice I've made to blow three years of savings on a trip around the world will pay off in intangible ways as it certainly won't bring about physical assets save for a slender, tanned frame. Most importantly, I need to keep my faith in humanity. I need to trust people are who they say they are, that they actually want to help when they offer to and, without putting myself in a dangerous situation, presume positive intent.

Up until this point I can't fathom how blessed I have been by those I've encountered along the way. They are the ones that carry me through. No matter where I go and who I meet, people are there to help me, they want me to find my way, they want me to enjoy my stay and they want to hear about who I am and what I'm about. And even though at times it feels like I'm recycling the same travel itinerary incessantly and investing in relationships today that will be over tomorrow, I hold out hope that life is better when surrounded by new friends. I hold out hope that human diversity should be a blessing not a curse. And I hold out hope that I will continue to be accepted by those I encounter even if I look like the BFG who lost his razor.

Faith in people. At the end of the day it's all we have. And right now, I'm at the mercy of this truth. As I prepare to fly to Bangkok on Wednesday, I'm filled with a cocktail of apprehension and excitement about how different the culture will be. When all our usual surroundings have disappeared into another plane-winged sunset, we must turn to the people around us and trust that our common humanity will be the link that connects us in the face of our differences.

david.

The feats of mankind are limited only by our imagination. As Elon Musk and his crew sent a damn car into space last week, the feeling that the future is here has never been more apparent. But has the future always been here? 

Wandering through Rome and Florence the past two weeks has made me realize how incredible human advancements have been over the past several thousand years. When I stare at the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore or any number of classic structures, I am staring at a paragon of creation. These buildings, conceived and built with inconceivably fewer resources than we have today, just leave you in a state of wonderment and awe as you attempt to process just how they did it.

If you asked me to immediately summon words to describe mankind 1000 years ago, they would be ones like "carnal", "conquer-driven" or "provincial". To my own dismay, I don't tend to give credit where credit is due. I just get caught up in ideas ingrained in my brain courtesy of my history teachers; thoughts of constant warfare, social ordinances, the mandated repression or utter lack thereof. I foolishly assume that because it was so long ago, they knew very little about the world around them and how things really worked. But despite their belief that the earth was flat or in a geocentric view of the universe, they did know an incomprehensibly large amount about applied mathematics, geometry, architecture, materials, etc. I just wonder if they realized just how influential their structures would be and for how long they'd be adored. 

This feeling of sheer awe catapulted to new heights while bearing witness to one particular work of art: Michelangelo's David. I can legitimately say that I've never been so taken by a single creation in my 27 years. 517 years ago, a 26 year old took a hunk of marble that had been sitting outside and extracted one of the world's most famous sculptures. 

Sculpture in general blows my mind. To take a large hunk of earth and work backwards to remove the excess material leaving just the components you desire, is tough to wrap my head around. But to evoke from the marble one of the most graceful (and disturbingly accurate) depictions of man, is just miraculous. 

Any art enthusiast will tell you that seeing a work of art in person trumps any photographic representation of it. But there's something to be said about the energy of a piece. A true work of art captures the essence of its creator and allows the latter to speak through the former for as long as the piece is beheld. In a magnum opus, an influential artist has not just created a lasting piece, they have secured their immortality and through it, I believe, kept a piece of their soul on display for all to see. 

As soon as I walked into the hallway where David stands, I felt his presence. I first tried to admire some of the other art on the walls before walking up to where he stood, but it was useless. He beckoned me forth. And I, swept away by his charm, proceeded. 

Now to appreciate beauty is simple. But to be vulnerable to beauty is not. To let the power of beauty wash over you, cleanse you and command you requires a degree of willingness that takes time and energy. But every once in awhile we come across an object that strips us of our guard and demands to affect us. David - the accurateness of his anatomy, the dynamic energy of his contrapposto, the promise of a shephard boy who will soon slay a great warrior and become king - all of this just grabs hold of your being and refuses to let go.