Many of my friends warned me that reverse culture shock (confusion resulting from going back to your own culture) would be worse than culture shock itself. One friend said “when you go to a new culture, you have an open mind, ready to take in the new culture. You don’t expect it to make sense to you.” However, when you go home, you expect to feel a certain way, to fit in. You expect it to make sense. So, if…
As I prepare to leave this country that has been my home for the past three months, I feel my memories have a stronger holder on me than they usually do. All through my travels in India, I’ve been haunted by the question: Do we live for the moment or live for the future? Does our sense of self reside in the unpinnable moment, or in our act of remembering times past? There are some things that are amazing to…
As I near the end of my time here in India, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m going to translate this experience into a narrative that I can share with people from home, including advice for people thinking about doing something similar in the future. Of all the lessons I think I’ve learned here, I think the one that is the most interesting and helpful is the management of confusion, something I touched on a bit in my…
Though Mcleod-ganj is officially the home of the Dalai Lama, he does not spend much time in the town to which many foreigners flock because of it’s relationship to him, as he spends most of his time travelling around the world, delivering talks and engaging in conversation about Buddhism, Joy, and Tibet’s situation. That is why I feel particularly lucky to have been able to attend two of his teachings- a one-day initiation into compassion and a three-day introduction to…
In the weeks before my departure for India, I read Rebecca Solnit’s book “A field guide to getting lost” partly in preparation for the exercise in losing and being lost that would come to be my trip to and through India. In one of the chapters, a Buddhist monk in San Francisco talks about a blind man who, when faced with a street corner, yells help until someone comes to his aid and helps him cross the street. The monk…
So, I am about two weeks away from my travel date, which is the perfect time to reflect/ get excited/ freak out about my next three months. I remember last year, around this time, when my friend Sam Mcmullen was rushing to get all his affairs in order before getting on a plane to travel halfway across the world as a SISA fellow. I remember not being able to imagine being in his place and yet, one year later and…
