The beauty about traveling is that it can make you feel both supremely adequate and yet inordinately inadequate, and sometimes both at the exact same time. Meeting new people is refreshing and challenging but also arduous and demanding. On some levels you get to know yourself, intimate depths of yourself that are reassuring and comforting - dimensions u know you would NEVER compromise on - but on other levels you wonder if maybe the 'diamond' in you isn't actually as bright as you think or you'd like it to be, that in fact perhaps its chipped and you just haven't noticed it cause the reflective glare from all your projected expectations have blinded you to it thus far. It makes me wonder whether self doubt is a healthy, perhaps even emancipatory, process or is it in fact a devastatingly schizophrenic process that gnaws at your soul only to perpetuate inadequacy?
SA thus far has been great, frustrating, challenging but most of all awakening - both to myself and w/r/t people and the world around me. Am currently in the process of planning a huuuge trip around southern africa a.k.a a 4x4, three girls, tents on the roof of the car and driving through namibia, zambia,zimbabwe, malawi, tanzania and perhaps mozambique.Should be fascinating. But I can't help wonder where all this will take me eventually. What all these experiences will culminate into, if they will actually culminate into ANYTHING?
I had this mini existentialist conversation with a friend the other day and it got me thinking, perhaps some people are just naturally a whole lot more introspective (perhaps even sensitive) than other people are - not necessarily a fun thing! Perhaps some people are comfortable within their little bubbles and seeing the world from within hipster sunglass frames cause it's easier, more reassuring and whole lot less challenging. Or maybe that's a pretentious statement, maybe that's just who they are and it's people like us/me that aren't really the norm hence its me who should make the effort to buy me a pair of hipster glasses? And thats when the question of adequacy and inadequacy comes in - do you conform even at the expense of compromising your integrity - cause c'mmon after all I am 22 - or do you experiment with your integrity, stick by it, even if it's lonely in there sometimes, and wait it out to see where it'll end up taking you? Honestly, im better at doing the latter, often stubbornly so, but then i wonder DO the hipster glasses make for a prettier picture? or is life on the fringe REALLY a unique perspective that for some reason I've had/am having the opportunity to view?
In some ways, more than human rights issues and international relations jargon, these are the questions I hope to answer - or at least begin to ask - by the end of my stay here in SA.
On that note - OFF to Haloween in Jo'burg. :)