The Art of Disorientation: Reflections from My Thai Adventure
Early June: Hey Jessica, remember you’re on deck for a newsletter about Thailand after your trip, ok?
Me: Yep yep, on it.
Travel ensues…time passes….
I need to write that newsletter. What about? I’ve written about past travels, how important I think it is, how it stretches us and invites us to grow. I even wrote about going to see Rick Steves speak about travel. I’m such a nerd. What else do I have to say on this topic?
For some reason this year I’ve needed more time to process my travels and find the insights. I’m in a funny spot right now in my mind and my heart, and my trip to Thailand seemed to magnify it, twist it, distort an already somewhat disorienting experience as though it were a Salvador Dali or an M.C. Escher piece. Like, weird.
How do I write a newsletter about something I don’t even understand and am not sure I’m enjoying?
Then I saw this quote by Georgia O’Keefe, and I thought, there it is.
“I’ve done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.” – Georgia O’Keefe, letter to Russel Vernon Hunter, October 21, 1933
I think that’s the headline. I’m having trouble finding myself lately, and I’m waiting to come back to myself. And travel both helps that to happen by knocking me out of my (sometimes unhelpful) frame of reference and makes it harder by reminding me I am but a speck in the universe.
I was surprised by and enthralled with Thai culture, and how different it is from everything I’ve experienced previously and especially our hard-charging, achievement-oriented way of being in the United States. Thai people are generally upbeat and easygoing and have no illusions about the limitations of constant striving. People everywhere felt to me to be living very much in the present (like the guy sitting in the window), inhabiting their bodies fully, enjoying all the tiny, daily pleasures that life has to offer. They weren’t thinking about yesterday, or tomorrow. When I was describing this to someone, they quipped, “don’t worry, nothing is under control.” Exactly.
That mindset extends to relationships and kindness towards complete strangers. I was introduced to Kitikong Tilokwattanotai, an artist in Chiang Mai, by an extended family member living in Bangkok. Kitikong graciously took most of a day to show me the art scene in Chiang Mai – from the contemporary art museum to a fabulous ceramics factory to a private cultural center. He is a “big deal” artist – represented in galleries in Bangkok, Singapore, and Paris, and yet he joyfully answered all of my questions about the art world. We even ran into another “big deal” artist friend of his at lunch, and they both insisted I try everything they were eating at lunch in addition to my own to expand my experience of Thai cuisine.
I’m not sure I’ve got anything sorted from the stew I seem to be in lately, and when I’m asked about my trip to Thailand, my pensive, somewhat mediocre responses to people are often mistaken for not having had a good time. I did have a good time, but the overwhelming number of different, disrupting, expanding experiences I had there were really the thing. Something I think all of us need more of. Vacation, or travel, shouldn’t always be about maximizing enjoyment, though you would think otherwise from pop culture and social media. Sometimes it’s about disrupting us, forcing us to examine our assumptions about what makes a good life, and challenging us to find our own individual answer to that question.
Jessica
Founder & CEO
The Sparks Group