The realization

The alley way echoes sounds of car horns, electric motorcycles, and bicycles, creeping up the walls each distinct in its own; beep, squeal, honk, meep, all ricocheting like bullets in an old western off the gritty concrete walls. The rain started to plunk onto the apartment windows, droplet after droplet tumbling down the cracked glass pooling on the sill. Flecks of grit and dead mosquitoes floating on a river of polluted rain water dripping onto the concrete floor next to my head. I popped out of my stale sleep and thought to myself that I had better check my car windows, that feeling, the “oh shit feeling,” “Did I leave them down?”

 It’s at that moment that it hit me like a pimp hits a hoe, a loving tap of correction. I don’t have a car and if I did it was thousands of miles away and an ocean over.  It’s this moment in particular I realized I was in China for the next year…“oh shit self what have you gotten into this time?” The ambience of the settings are what I imagine a newly released hostage might feel like; the smell of sulfured water and burnt hair; sticky humidity on my skin like duct tape combined with saliva, my nose plugged from attempting to filter heavy pollutants out of the air, and I knew nothing would ever be the same and although it hurt for right now it hurt like hell to give up all that I knew, all that I had built, it was time to ­­start living this life.

It was time to give up being comfortable and start living. Now, I am no “pain tourist” by any means I am not tending to the lepers or saving kids from a Ghana refugee camp to make myself feel better for being born “suburban middle class and white.” It’s that any major change worth doing requires a period of discomfort. It is the level that we perceive this discomfort to be at that holds us back from making severe life altering decisions on a moments notice. Fortunately this primal reaction is something I was born with out and I have moved freely between different communities across the US making friends and enemies where ever I have gone. Bouncing around the Northwest and California was fun and setting up a new life experiment wherever I went couldn’t prepare me for truly immersing myself in China. I don’t know what you would call a person like me... I go somewhere for a year or two and setup a life and then when I think I have learned everything I can from the people I have surrounded myself with I tear it all down and rebuild somewhere new.

A life that is a little rough around the edges is comfortable for me. A life where it’s okay for the paint to run into one another and to enjoy the outcome as just that the outcome or the hodge podge of culture overlapping one another with lessons learned from each is essential. A life where you can’t count on everything to work out. A life free of status anxiety, just do what you want when you want depending on the weather outside.

A nomadic life is preferable to me.

This post has been handcrafted by Benton