"...And Kota Kinabalu, this small town packed with enough surprises for a far larger settlement, is contrite and humble in its generosity. It asks for no acknowledgement except sincere engagement, and its miracles are unnamed and unadvertised. The visit has been a very personal interaction between me and the city, and this is what the city does well, and I don't think it should pretend to be anything more glorious. I like it very much the way it is, in its giving and giving and asking nothing in return except that you keep your memories and be ready to consider coming back..."
"...how can you remain sad at the sight of such glory? When the plane leapt into the air, everything below was outlined in stark detail by the bright sun. The sky is clear today, and the sea was achingly blue under the pure light, the islands compact and burstingly verdant, all that life miniaturised and romanticised by distance and speed till you think you can reach out and cup it in your hand. To fly is a blessing, and if my heart can be taken into the sky, then it sees everything as comparably small, and only a tiny part of an incomprehensibly detailed, breathtakingly beguiling, painfully beautiful pattern of the larger glorious universe.
The world is so wide, and as long as you are moving, there is still hope. And going elsewhere is a declaration of hope. This is, by no means, the end: and I look forward with bated breath to the next time I fly elsewhere."
- Excerpted from my journals, 09.01.08
I'm back, ladies and gentlemen! Back from a weeklong sojourn in West Borneo, and it was a grand time. It really felt like a retreat from the world, a time for the kind of reflection that puts all your life into the right perspective, identifies the parts that are important and worth cherishing and the parts that can and should be dumped overboard as dead wood. I wrote a lot on this trip, and sketched a fair bit - to the extent that I came to the unprecedented and happy phenomenon of running out of blank paper halfway through and having to buy a local sketchbook. My paper and pencil were my faithful companions throughout this trip; and now, returning to the online medium, I still feel reluctant to leave handwriting aside for the time being.
But I digress. The trip - it was wonderful, and deeply nourishing, I think. I see it as the most important single trip since Frexprog, a trip that taught me more about myself and how I see the world, that taught me more about the world and its mechanisms. I come out of it feeling like I've grown, like there has been a fundamental shift in my perception. I would like to think that I have become more worldly, and therefore more understanding, tolerant and compassionate. I think the coming months will put that assertion to the test. But such is life; and I feel like I know it better now.
And this trip was filled with all these moments of clarity and Zen-like (well, I imagine Zen to be like this) revelation. Moments when the light hit the earth just so, and the sounds and the sensation of the air come together to form a compelling pattern, like a crescendo that is only audible to the soul. Moments on a mountainside, gazing at the grey peaks of Mt. Kinabalu silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky. Moments in the city, coming across surprises and miracles that are even more touching because they are so quotidian and unremarkable to local eyes. Moments with people, strangers briefly united by a commonality of place and direction, free of obligations to each other beyond check-out time, and free, therefore, to act truly and frankly with one another to find that one meaningful gesture that can be shared between them before one or the other has to move on. Sarawak and Sabah offered these moments in astonishing abundance, and every night I found myself spellbound, and compelled to exhaust my paper in an attempt to record at least a shadow of this bounty.
It seems like I will, after all, have to write another booklet, to do true justice to this trip. And it has awakened in me a real hunger for Elsewhere, to fly away and discover something new. I had always dreamed of spending this gap year traveling, and now, with the experience of this trip, I am determined to put in effort to make that dream a reality. And so there is a sense of a new era definitively beginning, as the old times in the shadow of the Army fade away into their proper proportions. This is a time of searching, of looking for truths about the world, of looking for a frame of mind that will treat these truths with the respect and compassion that they deserve.
*
Finally, finally ended my long, long conversation with Pico Iyer in The Lady and The Monk. It's a great travel book that accompanied me across continents and oceans, and in reading it, I found myself being continually reminded to treat new places and people with a sense of wonder and amazement. This book sustained me when I was growing weary of wanderlust, and it enhanced the moments when I was enthralled with what I was encountering, often by pure and uncanny coincidence. It is the most sensitive book I've read by him, probably because it is a personal story for him as well. And it very aptly attuned my own moods and sensations to traveling. Without this literary companion, I don't think my trips would have been so enriching; certainly I would not have been as sensitive to the nuances.
I operate in patterns, and the patterns I saw, the correlations between the recorded experiences of Iyer and the experiences I am recording, were deeply poignant. I would not venture to say that Iyer's way of traveling is the best, but I am sure that it is superior to the way that I had been traveling before, and in reading him (and especially reading him abroad), I have grown into someone who can better extract the unfamiliar delights from a foreign situation, emphasising the delight and even turning the unfamiliar into the tantalising. I would recommend any of his works to anyone traveling out of one's own familiar environment; I would recommend The Lady and The Monk especially to those who are on the brink of losing faith in the palliative power of the new.
*
And, coming back, I find two letters from abroad. One's a postcard from Spain's Costa Del Sol, and the other's a YouTube video from London. The latter is such an elegant solution to the problems of the slowness of mailed handwriting and the impersonality of email that I find myself truly touched and impressed. It sidesteps the necessary time-lag of air-mail, and adds a personal connection to the internet medium. I found myself looking this friend in the eye, even though it's a digital one, and grinning like a fool at the screen. Heh, and while not stealing the credit of the sheer genius of this solution, I think this is a method that I will have to investigate myself in the future!
This one's for you, my friends. This one's for you.
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