Ohana
Given how far away I live from everyone I'm related to on the planet, family has had a profound impact on my last week. I’ve often felt life will suddenly present me with thought-provoking groups of moments or messages coded in a rush of experiences that focus me on things that deserve greater consideration. Maybe it is just my mind finding constellations where there are just disparate stars, but sometimes it feels overwhelming. Either way, recently, this has meant invisible sermons by symbolic bludgeoning. Whether it be the sudden and extensive engagements of close friends from a variety of periods of life (four in a week! one from high school, one from penn, one from fulbright, one from citadel!) or the night I ran into three different Harvard people in ten minutes reconnecting me to my social life my first three months here, or the stream of London visitors who've come knocking on my door over the last month or so that have shown me either just how much stays the same or just how much things change when you’re not watching them. And then there is my family.
I’m torn about this because even in the life I’ve lived, I’m starting to forget the look/taste/sound/smell/feel of specific places and times – the sun on my skin at the end of a school day in high school, shuffling across campus late at night in college, walking through ogikubo on a hot summer day in Tokyo, riding my bike home in sendai. How can I regret not having more when I already can’t handle the just enough that I had? But in my own family and in waves over the last week, I've seen into the lives of people I am related to and see the great beyond of all the things I still hope and believe I need to accomplish in my life, and am marked by sadness at opportunities missed in my past. And yes, most of it has to do with traveling and living and exploring life.
First, and to be honest, least unabashedly inspiring, is Makoto. He has been touring in Europe and we had dinner together last week. I say he's the least inspiring of the bunch because most of his time spent abroad is train rides and flights and time spent in cities after dark, split between room service and hours spinning drum and bass in loud and most likely drug-filled clubs. But the idea that he has spent the last decade doing something he loves and seeing the world one gig at a time is pretty incredible. The frustrations he has had chasing this dream have been many, and I do not wish them upon myself, but it's incredible that he's made it as far as he has doing this and is as well known as he is, and has been to so many places doing it. It's also been remarkable as his cousin to see how much it has changed him - maybe it's just because English is a more directly emotional language than Japanese, but since he started to speak English so much more fluently, he tells me so much more and it's so much easier to see who he is as a person.
But the main moment of clarity came via missing the Chang family reunion which just ended in Hawai'i. Aside from the fact that it was sad to miss this reunion (the last one was incredible and changed my entire perspective on my family in Hawai'i and its place in my life), it was completely eye-opening to see the list of people not attending because of conflicts. And "David is living in Europe" was the most boring one! One was Jeff, who I'm sure I've written about before on this blog because he's one of the people I respect most in the world - a talented and respected writer with strong opinions and views and belief who sticks to them vehemently both professionally and personally, and someone who has cut his own path in the world and left behind a musical and literary legacy that is undeniably significant. Another is Leah, who I'm not incredibly close to, who has spent nearly the last 2 years in Africa doing aid work. Another is Ryan Lee, who I don't even think I've met more than once, but is in Tibet on a spiritual journey (!?). But most of all, it is Kalei.
Kalei hasn't even gone to college yet - she's 18 and on her gap year - but she has always struck me as much more mature in many ways (not every way) than her age would suggest. Two summers ago, she was in Chicago and we only we are able to see each other a few times, but I never felt like she was just my kid cousin; well, except the time she decided to climb into a tree during a crowded girl talk set and I thought she was going to die and her blood was going to be on my hands. But otherwise, she was totally cool! But I've been extremely impressed and moved by who she has become since making the extremely wise decision to take a gap year before college - something most American kids do not do. She has spent her year in Alaska essentially doing manual labor to fund her year, traveling the US and Europe a bit, teaching in Africa, teaching in the Himalayas, and traveling around India; and I'm sure there is more to come. Reading her blog (I haven't talked to her since right before she left Africa), I'm not only struck by her extremely mature perspectives and casually skillful analysis of her situation and what is surrounding her or her writing abilities, which are tremendous, but by just how impressive it is that a girl who grew up on Oahu has come to dream on such a profound scale at such a young age. When I left high school to go to college, the farthest I could see to the horizon was leaving California to live on another coast; Kalei has managed to stitch together a year traveling the world that I'm not sure I would have the imaginative breadth to put together right now. And she somehow has the perspective to digest it in astoundingly astute ways.
It makes me wonder - has life changed so greatly in the last two decades that generation gaps occur in ten year periods now (seems possible - I don't understand Twitter!)? Was I so sheltered and narrow-minded and innocently simple in high school that I just completely missed the opportunity to live and experience on the scale my young cousin is doing now (even more plausible, really)? Whatever it is, it makes me think I completely missed out on an opportunity to make my life truly extraordinary, but I can't blame myself because I just wasn't capable of thinking on the scale necessary to live it out. But now I feel like I am; with every passing day there are goals that I set for myself that have nothing to do with my life today that I feel I must accomplish or risk quietly feeling like I've peppered my time with minor failures. As always, that is overly dramatic and fatalistic, but I also think that fear and drive is what gives me hope that I'll be able to sit down one day years from now and feel truly satisfied with how things turned out. And that is another thing the last few years and being related to people like Jeff and Kalei has done - it has slowly evolved my concept of success into something completely different. Or it has at least added a completely different dimension to it. And that's not to say my idea of what 'success' meant was some narrow-minded, dollar or title-based definition; I always realized the many different possible ways to approach it and realize it. But it's the difference between knowing something and truly believing and understanding it. And I'm beginning to see life as a kaleidoscope, and starting to think maybe I've spent too long gazing intently at the tiniest colors and shapes and opening up my field of vision and turning the god damn barrel to see just how much I can possibly see.
I’m torn about this because even in the life I’ve lived, I’m starting to forget the look/taste/sound/smell/feel of specific places and times – the sun on my skin at the end of a school day in high school, shuffling across campus late at night in college, walking through ogikubo on a hot summer day in Tokyo, riding my bike home in sendai. How can I regret not having more when I already can’t handle the just enough that I had? But in my own family and in waves over the last week, I've seen into the lives of people I am related to and see the great beyond of all the things I still hope and believe I need to accomplish in my life, and am marked by sadness at opportunities missed in my past. And yes, most of it has to do with traveling and living and exploring life.
First, and to be honest, least unabashedly inspiring, is Makoto. He has been touring in Europe and we had dinner together last week. I say he's the least inspiring of the bunch because most of his time spent abroad is train rides and flights and time spent in cities after dark, split between room service and hours spinning drum and bass in loud and most likely drug-filled clubs. But the idea that he has spent the last decade doing something he loves and seeing the world one gig at a time is pretty incredible. The frustrations he has had chasing this dream have been many, and I do not wish them upon myself, but it's incredible that he's made it as far as he has doing this and is as well known as he is, and has been to so many places doing it. It's also been remarkable as his cousin to see how much it has changed him - maybe it's just because English is a more directly emotional language than Japanese, but since he started to speak English so much more fluently, he tells me so much more and it's so much easier to see who he is as a person.
But the main moment of clarity came via missing the Chang family reunion which just ended in Hawai'i. Aside from the fact that it was sad to miss this reunion (the last one was incredible and changed my entire perspective on my family in Hawai'i and its place in my life), it was completely eye-opening to see the list of people not attending because of conflicts. And "David is living in Europe" was the most boring one! One was Jeff, who I'm sure I've written about before on this blog because he's one of the people I respect most in the world - a talented and respected writer with strong opinions and views and belief who sticks to them vehemently both professionally and personally, and someone who has cut his own path in the world and left behind a musical and literary legacy that is undeniably significant. Another is Leah, who I'm not incredibly close to, who has spent nearly the last 2 years in Africa doing aid work. Another is Ryan Lee, who I don't even think I've met more than once, but is in Tibet on a spiritual journey (!?). But most of all, it is Kalei.
Kalei hasn't even gone to college yet - she's 18 and on her gap year - but she has always struck me as much more mature in many ways (not every way) than her age would suggest. Two summers ago, she was in Chicago and we only we are able to see each other a few times, but I never felt like she was just my kid cousin; well, except the time she decided to climb into a tree during a crowded girl talk set and I thought she was going to die and her blood was going to be on my hands. But otherwise, she was totally cool! But I've been extremely impressed and moved by who she has become since making the extremely wise decision to take a gap year before college - something most American kids do not do. She has spent her year in Alaska essentially doing manual labor to fund her year, traveling the US and Europe a bit, teaching in Africa, teaching in the Himalayas, and traveling around India; and I'm sure there is more to come. Reading her blog (I haven't talked to her since right before she left Africa), I'm not only struck by her extremely mature perspectives and casually skillful analysis of her situation and what is surrounding her or her writing abilities, which are tremendous, but by just how impressive it is that a girl who grew up on Oahu has come to dream on such a profound scale at such a young age. When I left high school to go to college, the farthest I could see to the horizon was leaving California to live on another coast; Kalei has managed to stitch together a year traveling the world that I'm not sure I would have the imaginative breadth to put together right now. And she somehow has the perspective to digest it in astoundingly astute ways.
It makes me wonder - has life changed so greatly in the last two decades that generation gaps occur in ten year periods now (seems possible - I don't understand Twitter!)? Was I so sheltered and narrow-minded and innocently simple in high school that I just completely missed the opportunity to live and experience on the scale my young cousin is doing now (even more plausible, really)? Whatever it is, it makes me think I completely missed out on an opportunity to make my life truly extraordinary, but I can't blame myself because I just wasn't capable of thinking on the scale necessary to live it out. But now I feel like I am; with every passing day there are goals that I set for myself that have nothing to do with my life today that I feel I must accomplish or risk quietly feeling like I've peppered my time with minor failures. As always, that is overly dramatic and fatalistic, but I also think that fear and drive is what gives me hope that I'll be able to sit down one day years from now and feel truly satisfied with how things turned out. And that is another thing the last few years and being related to people like Jeff and Kalei has done - it has slowly evolved my concept of success into something completely different. Or it has at least added a completely different dimension to it. And that's not to say my idea of what 'success' meant was some narrow-minded, dollar or title-based definition; I always realized the many different possible ways to approach it and realize it. But it's the difference between knowing something and truly believing and understanding it. And I'm beginning to see life as a kaleidoscope, and starting to think maybe I've spent too long gazing intently at the tiniest colors and shapes and opening up my field of vision and turning the god damn barrel to see just how much I can possibly see.
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