Australian Update
I am a one-man Lewis and Clark. It does not matter that hundreds of men — explorers, prospectors, cartographers, guidebook authors, and students on holiday — have covered this same land before me with both concrete and rubber; I feel as though I am the first to walk the avenues of Queensland’s fair capitol. It’s a strange place to have chosen as a frontier (albeit a semester-long one), but one that certainly leaves much to be charted and accounted for.
It’s not an easy thing to be alone, truly alone, and I sincerely doubt that the majority of my countrymen have dared to learn this lesson. And why should they? Happiness is indeed best when shared, and those with the privilege of others to share with seem hardly likely to go about giving it up. However, it takes a certain type of person to wander the path alone, for however briefly. Not only must you be comfortable with the entirety of yourself, as only you can know, but you must also be happy with that same “you” otherwise you will never reach the end intact. And even if you have these, they are no guarantee. It will be difficult in either case, but the reward for taking on solitude is great: a much stronger, wiser, wholer you.
My adjustment to life in Australia has been slow and at times painful. I have wrestled with the transition and a drastically different way of life that I simultaneously yearn for and detest. I entered the country from a life in Tokyo of pure independence and much satisfaction into the structure of university life - both a blessing for its opportunities and safety net, but a curse for its demands and nature. Sure I could go to class every day and eat every meal at the dining hall and meet college buddies at the Regatta every weekend and do just fine, but that was never what I really wanted. Instead I am spending my idle hours walking near-deserted streetscapes in search of culture, experience, something new and enlightening for me to take away from this riverside city. It has been trying and slower than both average and expected, but I am coming around at long last, finally able to be alone.
Of course there are other circumstances at play. In my solitude I am subconsciously asking myself the age old existential question, “what does it mean to live?” Yet I am not just pondering the dilemma in passing, I am deeply invested in the answer as I never have been before. Once the formalities and comforts of my previous life have fallen away, I am left wondering which of them are meaningful to me. Perhaps this feeling of uneasiness has been brought upon by my seniority, the mere proximity I have to making my life in the world alone. Looking back, I have no memories of a time when I was not under the wing of one educational institution or another, so it could be that I have less of an identity independent of academia. Or perhaps I have just grown tired of expending energy on the meaningless or the monotonous. I cannot yet say which is closer to the truth.
It’s not the solidarity of my life here that bothers me. I’m the only one in an empty cinema theatre listening to the same eight French covers on replay monopolise the complex’s airwaves. Like clockwork the film begins on time, even though it’s for an audience of one. It’s not so bad; there is some beauty in a whole world played out for my eyes alone. It’s almost more real when it’s just me. But it is a steep and at times unwanted task I have put upon myself to start at square one once again, with nothing to help me make my way. It is up to me and only me, for better or worse. Surprisingly, this fact is not oppressive in the least. In fact, it’s liberating. It has given me permission to make the decisions others cannot make, and to find my way home without a map, or indeed whether to stop here to make my own home on this foreign soil or to keep heading west in pursuit of something greater.
Perhaps the only way for a place to feel like a true frontier, vulnerable to the twenty-first century manifest destiny is to look at the landscape alone. The pioneers made their cities with their hands, while I am afforded the same freedom by my imagination (and a fairly comprehensive public transit system), but we will both have to deal with the same problems. No, I don’t mean rattlesnake bites and uncles dying of beriberi, but instead how incredibly complex of a feeling it is to have the world at your fingertips, a vast land of opportunity at your disposal, but one without your wife and children, one where you must give up all of your friends and family, and everything you have ever known. The question really is: will I find something in this new land that was worth leaving behind?