“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed.
When it rains, it pours, and then it floods in Thailand. Fat, warm raindrops fall with abandon onto candy-colored umbrellas. Motorcycle taxi drivers, protected in billowing blue ponchos, launch murky waves of water onto unsuspecting passersby. Torrential currents sweep all manner of detritus through back sois, onto jagged sidewalks, and eventually down rusty storm drains.
I am feeling soaked to the bone in Bangkok. An unforgiving second wave of food poisoning last week was so severe that I fainted and hit my head in the bathroom. The subsequent doctor’s appointment left me $400 poorer (so much for affordable healthcare) and with the sage advice to “exercise more” and “take some vitamin C” to “get the endorphins going.” Thanks, doc. Work is a mixture of disappointment, exasperation, and gratification. Newly made friends are departing for good come December. The entire city wears black and white in mourning for the passing of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger spiritually than we were before.
Books I have read (or re-read) here that remind me to smile, to be grateful, to push forward: The Book Thief, Flowers for Algernon, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, The Giver, The Alchemist.
People who are helping me recognize and embrace this process of change:
Kru (teacher) Brood – learning Thai while cramming way too many vegetables and weird fish rolls into a boiling hot pot at MK
The Hottliebs – reminding me about the golden “6-month mark” while mourning the Dodgers' losses
The Scot – roaming through packed Sunday markets and searching for tea lattes at every hipster coffee shop in town
New Friends – sipping mediocre wine in new neighborhoods while swapping expat stories
Old Friends – telling tales of Thailand to eager ears and belly laughing my way to comfort
Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening.
I’ve been around the block enough times to know that this inertia, this unpleasant weight is, in all likelihood, tremendous growth unfolding. I am reexamining who I believe myself to be - my sense of self-worth, my professional ambitions, my undeniable priorities, and, perhaps most importantly, my physical tolerance for som tam pet (spicy papaya salad).
Laughing, mostly at myself, eases so many aches. I didn’t know, for instance, that you have to lick the back of stamps here. Imagine that scenario at the post office. I also failed to say “I want this one” in Thai at the market the other day, but somehow managed a broken conversation with a taxi driver about living, working, and renting an apartment in Bangkok. The embarrassing cherry on top was after I insisted on taking The Scot to his first ballet, a world debut performance of The Nutcracker + A Christmas Carol. Mortification set in right after the shirtless, horned, black leather adorned, red Devil closed out Act I surrounded by haggard dancing ghost ghouls. I missed the Mouse King. The Scot will miss every future invitation to the ballet.
Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life.”
– Alice Walker
It takes a strong reminding sometimes, but I do love the rain.
