Monday, April 12, 2010

Reflections on the transition back to normalcy

While I was in Cambodia and Nepal I deliberately isolated myself from everyday concerns - stopped reading any news feeds at all, almost entirely stopped thinking about research or other work-related matters. Now that I am in Turkey (the very European Istanbul region), I find myself beginning the transition back - I have begun to skim the New York Times on-line news headlines again, and I have begun looking at a couple of my works-in-progress, getting myself back into thinking about research and teaching. Partly this is because I will soon be in the UK, where I will go back to work for a couple of months, both working on the project I will be doing with Lynne Cameron and reworking a couple of other works-in-progress, but partly the normalcy of life in this region of Turkey has brought the most adventurous aspects of my trip to a close.

It took me about five days to become quite familiar with both the overall layout of Istanbul and the skills needed to find my way around the city. It helped that the bus Aybuke and I took back from Edirne dropped us off right next to the place where one transfers from the Metro Bus to the Metro subway to the airport, so this morning I knew exactly where I was going to get to the airport - and getting back from the airport will be simply the opposite. That experience somehow brought it all together; if telt like the familiar "click" of comprehension. The little akbil gadget for paying metro fares is wonderful - saves a lot of standing in line. Now that I am getting fully familiar with it, I find myself envying Istanbul's mass transportation system, with its combination of subway / surface trains, Metrobusses that run on dedicated lanes in the central freeway, light rail, and local busses. It took a while to get used to the system of identifyhing stops by neighborhood name rather than by major streets, but now I find that system familiar and easy to use - to recall and recognize the neighborhood names I need to know. And so I out of the region of maximum ambiguity and back into the world of the predictable and the comprehensible. Aybuke has helped a lot with this transition, but I feel now that I could find my way to pretty well any destination in this region.

Especially in Nepal, but also in Cambodia, Bangkok, and India, the sense of unpredictability is what created the most consistent source of both anxiety and adventure. Things are often quite different from how they are described or represented, basic services like water, electricity, and transportation often don't work or work intermittently, information is often incomplete or even misleading, and there are beggars, touts, and other parasites everywhere. The result is that it is necessary to maintain a constant level of alertness and attention that is not necessary in more familiar circumstances - and for this purpose I find that Turkey qualifies as more familiar. It took a few days to understand the pattern of life here, but it has a pattern, there are rules, and once the pattern is understood it is predictable and familiar.

Dealing with the ambiguity and unpredictability has been bracing. It is nice to be able to relax and take basic things for granted, but I will probably miss the intellectual and emotional challenge of Asia. I think part of what I hoped for was to get as completely as possible outside of my normal ways of thinking and responding, and the first part of this trip definitely accomplished that. Based on the couple of hours I spent reviewing the editor's comments on one of my current works in progress then re-reading a draft of the essay, I can tell that I will slip easily back into the academic and theoretical way of thinking, and I will probably just as easily slip back into my daily meal and exercise routines when I reach Ireland and the UK. Still, I think the habits of alertness that emerged out of not being able to take things entirely for granted will stay with me for quite a while.

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