Futures

Of course, while I have been here, lots of people ask me what happens after Peace Corps, and I cheerfully tell them the truth: I have no freaking clue. Of course I have ideas, there would be ways to stay in Ecuador or ways to extend this period of travel in another part of Latin America. Presumably, there are jobs for which I would be a convincing candidate in New York or DC or some part of North Carolina. But these are only ideas, and as of yet I have no strong feeling about what the right move would be.

Riding the subway, walking the streets, I remembered how it felt to live in the city. But I found myself here, feeling very much like I used to the first day back from vacation. You know that sense of peace and well being and ability to put things in perspective that goes away about halfway through the third day after you go back to work? I suspect that taking up residence again there woul be like the life-scale version of that. Right now, the part of my brain that was always occupied with work, social life, apartment details, where to buy groceries that day, how much I spent on dinner last night and what have you, is curiously still. And I thought: if I could live in New York without it generating the list of complaints, anxieties, and heachaches that New York seems to produce in me then I could really enjoy it. It would be a great place to return to.

What I note is an absence of a distinctly unpleasant feeling that I often had for many years while living there. Something like guilt, a nagging sense of having let many people down, of having done things badly or shoddily. I do feel preoccupied with things in Ecuador the collective I have been organizing, the complicated details of my friends' lives in which I am much too involved, but there is a safety valve. When I go in August or whenever that happens, my responsibility and ability to be affected by them simply come to an end. And right now all those challenges seem remarkably far away and short lived. I suppose the question is how to design your life so you feel that way anywhere.

Lord knows how to do that.