Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [121]
It seems to me that the two worlds represent extremes in many ways. Extreme individualism and extreme social conformity. Extreme privacy and extreme communalism. On one hand, a society of too many freedoms; on the other, too many constraints. My Canadian friend complaining vaguely that his mother doesn’t understand him, and one of my students sobbing as she left college and her quiet, artistic boyfriend to marry a rough, domineering man twenty years her senior, because her parents said she had to and she dared not contradict them. I wonder where in the world it would be possible to have the ideal, a middle way, a balance between individuality and responsibility to the larger community. Easily named, of course, but I cannot begin to imagine where to achieve it.
What appeals to me most strongly about Bhutan is that daily life still makes sense. It runs on a comprehensible scale. A small farm with a few cows, a few chickens, a kitchen garden, a few cash crops, and the family has a place to live, food to eat. The mountains still have their forests intact, which means few floods, little soil erosion and enough fuelwood and timber for the small population. Small things still make a difference: a pipe to bring clean water down to a village, a basic health unit offering vaccinations and prenatal care.
Sometimes, when I am describing a typical Bhutanese village, people sigh and say oh how lovely. They want to believe in the Bhutan I used to believe in, a lost world in the mists of time, the fairy-tale place I first imagined two years ago, looking at black-and-white pictures in the library. But fairy tales don’t have villages without a clean water supply, or four-year-olds dying of dysentery or tuberculosis. People don’t want to hear this. Nor do they want to hear my criticisms of life in Canada. Everyone wants a cleaner, simpler, safer, saner world but no one wants to give up anything. No one wants to take the bus.
My grandfather is upset that I am going back. “You can’t tell me that life is better over there,” he says. “I saw those pictures you sent.”
“But it is better in some ways,” I say. It is safer, it is smaller, it is more real.
“They don’t have anything,” he says.
“They have what they need.”
He shakes his head. “I just don’t understand why you’re going back,” he says. “After all, it’s not like you’re not getting anything out of it.”
Even with friends, it is difficult. They talk about their work, their plans, academic conferences, the split in the department. I sit politely at the edge of the conversation, and when it is my turn to talk, about Bhutan, my work, my students, I tell too much or not enough, and it is impossible to explain my love for the place, and how it has changed me utterly. Everyone seems sharp, impatient, aggressive, cynical, all raised eyebrows and ironic smiles.
I feel slow. I think slowly, I talk slowly, I react slowly. In the blur and rush of everything around me, I am more mindful. The mindfulness has grown quietly and surely, perhaps more a result of my slow, sparse environment in Kanglung than my own efforts. I can see how it would evaporate here without a consistent daily practice.
I scan the horizon from every window: grey city, frozen sky, smoke stacks belching yellow smog. I close my eyes and I can see the mountains from my window in Kanglung, the first pale light entering the valley, a raven circling a chorten. I count the days until I can go home, and there are too many so I call the airline and change the date of my return.
The world seems smaller on the return