Saturday, January 20, 2007

Uncollected Thoughts - 1/20/07

I can't grab onto a thought anymore,
can't make one sit still long enough to spit out.

They flit around like butterflies,
wings glistening in brand new light
their perfect painted patterns viewed in strobe relief,
burning only a memory onto my mind's screen

Ideas spring into the air
and are dashed apart each moment anew
flash in the dark,
and ashes slip through fingers
that type only as fast as they can.

There are many things I have wanted to do since getting back to Samara from my trip to Siberia and Mongolia. Just one of them was to write down every amazing thing I saw, to write in detail about what felt to me like a great adventure. That feeling is one I do not have much living here in Samara. This is something I realized in my travels, that my life in Samara no longer feels like travel, but has a bit of the comfortable elements that feel a bit like a home, familiar friends, rituals, geography, language. When I was on the last days of my trip, in Mongolia, sick and tired and cold from the unsanitary food and the horseback ride in the countryside, I longed to get back to the relative feeling of home I have in Samara. I felt spiritually renewed and ready to get back and attack my project with new energy.

Now, settling back in, I see that the feelings of home and comfort I have here are a double-edged sword. Not feeling like an alien frees me up to explore and participate in life here in ways I could not as a mere tourist. However, at the same time, the feelings of familiarity are based on having set rituals and established relationships based on a certain level of productivity, one that became unsatisfactory to me back in December. In December, I did not really accomplish much and spent the entire month procrastinating work on my next training, one I have yet to complete (though I have a good draft in English, I will translate this weekend).

This first week back, I have been struggling to reinvigorate my life here with the sense of spiritual renewal I had on my trip. I have started meditating, and have had conversations with two or three key liasons to my work here about my desire to do more, to restrategize so as to more effectively share the lessons of my experience in the Bronx. I have pledged to myself that I will finally decorate my room and spend less time on the internet. I hope to remember that peace and tranquility begins within us, if it is to be found in this chaotic world.

All these changes are proving difficult to make. I believe the relational psychoanalysts have it right in seeing the self as largely a product of the way we internalize our relationships to others. As much as I wish to somehow change something within myself to make me more productive, to better be an agent of change, I am dependent on my relationships to the people around me, and many of the people I work with in Samara have come to expect a certain degree of productivity from me. It also does not help that I will be leaving in another week for a mid-project seminar in Moscow and then for two weeks in the States for additional med school interviews.

In the meantime, my two conversations about my need to restrategize seem to have borne some small fruit. Berries, really. Katya, who works at PSI and oversees the case management program, and I agreed that we would go over the language of my Burnout Syndrome training on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Lyosha, who leads the local support group for PLWHA seems to have done some talking on my behalf, because within an hour or so, his girlfriend (who is trying to organize a group in nearby Togliatti and with whom I had planned to meet sometime this coming week) and Olga, his co-leader in the group (with whom I had talked about doing a training on coping strategies for PLWHA) called to finalize plans. So, now I have three things set in stone for the coming month and a half.

I'm reading a lot about the history of the Soviet Union these days. In particular I'm finally getting around to reading Remnick's "Lenin's Tomb," which is excellent. In it, I've come across the following wonderful quote by Andrei Sakharov, nuclear physicist, turned dissident and human rights activist:

"Other civilizations, perhaps more successful ones, may exist an infinite number of times on the preceding and following pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in the world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive."

This seems to me the perfect summary of what ethics should be in the post-modern era. I'm sold. Too bad he did not survive to lead Russia through perestroika. God only knows how much healthier this country's civil society would be had he not died.

I'm off to dance the night away at an all night party with four dance floors. Woo Hoo.