True Confessions of a Strange Sort

How can you say to all the people at home, whose dream is like your own, to travel the world, to go around the world, to sail the seas and forget about time… how can you, without coming across as a total porker, tell people so like you in desire that there is a downside to the dream? (And, of course, one of the things I learn again is that there is always something to whine about, and something to rejoice in, and often real objections of the prophetic kind to be raised, not all of which can be raised effectively, and so the work of discernment is never done.)

Today we arrived in Mauritius and I have gladly stayed on ship. I slept in till 8, the time that my classes begin every day at sea, and an hour later than my 7 a.m. office time! I was still in my pajamas at 10:30... when I mended pants I’d ripped on a plane in South Africa, then put them on. I graded papers to the sounds of the Elephant Orchestra. And now at 3:30, I make myself a cup of Pilao, Brazilian coffee, as I reorient myself towards a five hour dinner outing—I will get on a bus with 30 of my closest friends and go to a restaurant in Port Louis, where the chef of greatest renown in the Indian Ocean (and how is that for a frame of reference?) will give us a talk about cuisine, then demonstrate his skills and then, of course, provide our dinner.

I have more papers to grade, and I have to reconfigure my classes to work better in this alternate reality. I have a room to reorganize after stuffing everything away in high swells (though the sailing yesterday, when we might have met Cyclone Hondo, was so smooth that I did not notice the loss of my patch!). I am tired after learning how to live on a ship, rubbing elbows with people I adore and with people I abhor (poetic license on both ends!), and having to get along well with all of them, and trying to prepare three new courses to be taught in circumstances I literally could not imagine, much less have experienced. I have had several days of seasickness and this strange oceanic trancing exhaustion that is almost pleasurable if you can surrender to it! I have led field trips in every port so far, and there are endless meetings, many of them mandatory on this college campus. This week the students suddenly realized that they are going to pass or fail classes, and they literally brought their anxiety to my door, several of them, so I put up a sign, “This is not my office; it is my home. See you in class.” Yup, the excursion has been exhausting and demanding in ways I’d never have imagined. Most of us, me included, are finding the ship food almost unbearably monotonous (mind you, there is nothing wrong with it). Elizabeth told me that between seasickness and traveler’s illness, I might really lose some weight, but who would have thought that monotony and boredom might do it? And many of us have spent undue energy trying to stay in touch with home, also reducing our here and now presence. (I am resolved to do email in the early morning when I can get a connection and to live with my loneliness the rest of the time! Ah, yes, did I forget to mention the loneliness?)

Why have I not whined before, but seemingly do so now? Because I feel as though this stop in Mauritius is a transition time for me and probably for most of us travelers. I think that now I will be able to be present more and to deeply enter the journey, after giving a lot of energy to figuring out my context and learning how to be a good citizen of it. I have this feeling now of looking up from a totally absorbing task and realizing suddenly that I am sailing around the world! I am sailing around the world.

I hope to surf or snorkel or dive or all three tomorrow, though I have nothing scheduled.

I also hope to find something pretty to wear in Mauritius because I am afraid I 'way' overemphasized function, to the neglect of form, in my packing; I am afraid I have caused myself to feel unnecessarily frumpy. Nothing a pair of sandals and pretty skirt can’t fix!

Ah, levity....