“You can be fearless or you can be free.  You can’t be both.”

Whizzing by cars, people, dogs, and the wind inherent to autorickshaws, buffeting out skin, making a circus of our hair.  The driver points out hotels, tells us if they are cheap or expensive.  We aren’t looking for the hotels.  He discusses India and America. Asks us about race relations.

I don’t remember where we were, but the story is always the same.  He mentions that India is more free than America.  I consider this, and through the hum of the golf-cart-esque motor and find some truth in his words.  India indeed has more freedom than the land of the free.  We have given up some of our freedom.

For what?

Comfort and security are what I come up with.  One’s not better than the other.  They are just different ways to live.  You get used to either, given time.  I miss the freedom, manifested in informality.

Have I changed? Sure.  Not in some deep and sudden way though.  No instant enlightenment here. I have just added on perspective.  When you see something from a different angle for  while, it gets incorporated.  Less of a change, more of a shift.  Tilt your heel and slide two inches to the left.  A move of inclusion, a view previously un-experienced.

“A kind of vertigo overcomes me.  Words make no more sense.  Everything is a continuum.”

People ask me about how I am experiencing reverse culture shock.  I am not. Culture shock: nada. I am not overly surprised by the selection at the supermarket.  I do not balk at the over-use of water in the shower.  I do not shiver over the bodily frisson of being enveloped in another physical environment.  None of it makes an effect.  I am just home.

You’d think this might please me, but it doesn’t.  The other kids on my program, the other kids on ANY program, are have effects, even issues.  I got none of it.  I am left wondering at my lack of my experience with my environment.  Does it stem from a detachment to Nepal, or an attachment to DC, or a more general disengagement to the world or physical environment?  Either way, I feel like I’m missing out, like I should be feeling something.

But if I have to be missing something, at least it is leaving me happy.

“All you have to know is whether you’re lying of whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake about the distinction any longer.”

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