Thoughts are the rudders for our lives. When they are jumbled, the rudder spins in all directions, and the ship becomes lost or doesn’t move at all. When thoughts are positive and full of confidence, the rudder makes its adjustments as necessary, but no sea of trouble can throw the ship off-course. And when thoughts are depressed, it seems the ship has run aground and the rudder is mired down in the sandbars of life. Such are my thoughts right now.
I’ll be 36 next month, so I suppose I’m at the mid-life point of my life. The men of my family don’t live for very long after 60, and I have enough negative health markers to where I shouldn’t expect a long life. A heart attack took my father, paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother; cancer took my mother; and diabetes took my uncle. I’m single, overweight, and sedentary. In the game of life, I’m rolling snake eyes. Frankly, if I live past 40, I’ll be surprised.
But I’m really not upset about that thought. I don’t have enough that I’m attached to in this life to want to stick around for too long. No wife, no kids, no career that I’m supremely passionate about, no work that would really go undone. Life would go on with nary a misstep.
I reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’ve found myself, and I can honestly say that I took a wrong turn somewhere. How far back that wrong turn occurred is a question for the ages. You see, since I first saw James Clavell’s Shogun adapted into a mini-series in 1980, I’ve been fascinated with Japan and all things Japanese. The fascination has grown in the years since then to a point where I absorb my time in reading Japanese literature, studying Japanese religions and mythologies, watching Japanese TV shows and animes, listening to J-pop and J-rock music, and ultimately thinking about taking a Japanese language course at the local community college. Back to my original question of when I took the wrong turn — it almost feels like I took a wrong turn from the spirit world to the physical world. Basically, I feel like I was born in the wrong hemisphere.
One could most certainly argue that my fascination stems from the fact that Japanese culture is so different from American culture and that different things are attractive to humans. I’m not denying that. It’s definitely easier to take a logical approach over a metaphysical explanation, like having my pre-natal GPS all screwed up. But I have to wonder what would’ve become of my life if I had grown up in a family that fostered that interest in all things Japanese. Sure, my family paid for martial arts classes, but that’s as far as the cultural diversity of Asheville, North Carolina would take me in the 1970′s and 80′s. There were no Japanese language courses nearby, and I never saw a bookstore, much less a book of Japanese fiction, until I was in college.
Now that I’m at the mid-life point of my life, I can’t help but wonder where I would be if I had followed that passion. What if I had had Japanese as my foreign language in high school rather than Spanish? What if I had participated in a foreign exchange student program to Japan? Had I had all of that going for me, where would I be now with respect to my career? Would I be in a more fulfilling career? Would I have been passionate enough about it to develop it into a business that would grow and expand and set me up financially? Would I have met the love of my life over there? I certainly haven’t found her here.
It may be better to analyze why I think Japanese culture is better than the one I’m in now. Certainly, the fact that they have a culture puts them ahead of America in that respect. We’ve allowed offended people to dictate what we can display in public to the point that whatever culture we might have had in the past is no longer present. We are a nation without a culture, unless you consider mass consumption and consumerism to be cultural. Maybe deep down inside, I wish I had a culture to fall back on when all else failed — a reverence for Nature that the American Indians might have taught us if we hadn’t stamped it out with our Christian morals, a reverence for ancestors if our Christian theology hadn’t told us that ancestor “worship” was evil, a celebration to scare off the evil spirits if the Christians didn’t first call it evil and the atheists then called religious, an annual Thanksgiving that wasn’t turned into an excuse to eat way too much and spend the day watching bowl games, and an annual opportunity to give gifts and receive hope that wasn’t destroyed by rampant consumerism and rabid atheists.
Psychologically, who’s to say that we don’t need these outward expressions? Isn’t ritual an opportunity for the individual psyche to commune with the archetypes and symbols of thousands of years of human individual and social evolution? What have we missed out on by removing these aspects of our life and replacing them with what we have now? Maybe that’s what I like so much about Japanese culture — that they can be a Western economic power while maintaining their national spirit through Shinto, Buddhist, and other indigenous activities. They can be harder-working than most Americans while keeping one foot planted firmly on terra firma.
Who knows? I know that something is missing, and I’m not finding it where I currently am in life.
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I think it would be a good idea for you to teach English in Japan. At least for a couple years. You must!