January 09, 2007

What I learned from Egypt

I met a man on the flight to Cairo.

As a rule, I don't talk to fellow passengers until the pilot announces the decent to the destination. This prevents the possibility of poor conversation or any unwanted discussion from lasting very long.

We were an hour away from Cairo. I was excited to arrive and my anxiety and optimism led to me break my rule.

He told me about his life. At least the thiry-some years he had lived until then. He had left Egypt alone many years ago. He now lived in Michigan and worked for a pharmaceutical company.

I asked him many questions.

He answered them. He told me of his life, an arranged marriage that went bad before it started, the intellectual and economic ceiling kept over Egyptians by their government, and his reality he left in Alexandria, and his new life in in Michigan. He explained the culture he had left and the circumstances that led him to America.

"Are you Muslim?" Was one of my questions.

"Yeah, sure." he said with a mild shrug, barely visible through his white collared shirt.

I was satisfied with that answer. But just before that current breath expired in his chest, he plainly said something next I haven't forgotten. It seemed simple at that moment. Like a little snowball tossed from a mitten.

"We all were born into what we are." He said. "And I don't have time to read all the religions in the world and choose the best for me. I don't even have time to understand my own. This is the life I live inside. So.." he said as he nudged the rest of the thought off his shoulders with another quiet shrug.

His words fell on me and have been rolling down the mountain in my mind ever since.

It rolled with me past the bulls being slaughtered in the streets for the new year's feast. It rolled with me under the minarets blaring the Imam's prayers and the stray dogs and beggar's stares. It stuck with me and grew larger in late night conversations in living rooms, in shisha bars with Lebanese belly dancers dancing on T.V. and telling stories and drinking sweet tea, and in early morning runs alone along the shores of the Red Sea.

I began to see the edges of the life i live inside of.

I sat in the back behind the driver's seat. It was late in the night and we were driving south on the Corniche Al-Nil. I had been in Cairo for almost 3 weeks, and away from America for 4. No one in the car was talking. Christina was beside me, sleeping on her brother's shoulder. I put the window down and let the dusty air along the River move across me. It was empty and stale and smelled like warm concrete. The neon lights on the buildings burned in the dark. I couldn't read any of them, and I was no longer trying to. I looked down dark alleys between buildings. I stared into the gaping darkness above the Nile. I began to see the edges of the life i live inside of.

I sat in the back behind the driver's seat. Everyone in the car was quiet, sleeping, or lost on numbing thought coaxed forth by the Egyptian beer we were drinking earlier in the evening. But was wide awake. And I realized, even in that hour on that road, in the back seat of that car, I was still searching. Like a chain smoker fumbling with his yellow fingernails for another cigarette, it seemed there was nothing left to see but I was no longer able to close my eyes. I began to see the edges of the life i live inside of.

I had been heading to the edges for almost a month. I had been in countries whose languages I couldn't hear and whose words I couldn't read and whose ideas I didn't understand. I felt like I had been in the dark, and my pupils strained and split from being dilated so long, searching for meaning or to gain understanding. I had abandoned hope weeks ago that anyone would understand me. Instead, I was hoping the opposite; to find understanding in something else. My pupils were dilated. My head was empty. The window was down but nothing was blowing in. I began to see the edges of the life i live inside of.

I was a western man in eastern lands. An American Individualist in collectivist culture. A determinist, driven like a nail into a long and steady board in the fatalist's world. Finally, at the edges of my world that I was born into, I saw the residual results of my upbringing, from every act of logic and of emotion, to every dividing cell. I saw it all like an equation being drawn out slowly on a chalkboard: of the midwest protestant work ethic, of the seasons changing, the thin ice on Lost Creek, the springs inside the valves of a Yamaha motorcycle's carburetor, open tailgates and broken bones, every lesson learned. every fence row explored. and I saw my parents lives, of my grandparents lives, my great grandparents lives, of my government, my race, my politics and my economy, every factor and every variable and every catalyst in a long and laborious equation whose answer on the other side of the equal sign was what ran through the blood in my veins and in pulsed in the cortex of my brain.

We are all born into what we are.

Some spend their lives trying to leave it. Others spend theirs trying to live within it. While others, like myself, try to define it for themselves, and make it their own.

I don't have time to understand all the ways in the world and choose the best for me.

I can travel around the world to find and define my place within it. I will travel around my mind for the rest of my life, looking for it's edges; looking for a definiton to life.

And try to understand my own.

Posted by Todd Roeth at January 9, 2007 11:22 PM