Same as it ever was
New Year is, of course, that time for resolutions and reflections, bromides and broken wine glasses. Who am I to stray from tradition, so I’ve put on a record, poured the remaining tidal bay into a mug, and resolve to at least write more in the months ahead.
Last year was challenging. And the last years before it. We know the story, but pandemics or not, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the tumult of modern living, give in to doubts that we’re headed in the right direction, or taste the gnawing fear that we’re running out of time to do at least some of it all. Like many of us, I get into my own head too much, and stay there, having the same conversation over and over.
Appropriate then – and an unplanned segue – that the band playing on my turntable as I write this is Talking Heads, and specifically the song Once in a Lifetime. You know the one, with the vague but somehow precise refrain of “same as it ever was.” Lead singer David Byrne says the song is about how we operate on auto-pilot, not living in the moment while simultaneously headed for some half-awake future. We might end up asking ourselves “well, how did I get here?”
As I listen to this new wave classic and reflect on the past year and the months ahead, the record player in my mind skips back to a moment I had while a volunteer in Thailand in 1994. (Strangely, people claim that this is three decades ago.)
There was this day when I visited the ancient city of Ayutthaya, founded in 1350, the second capital of the Siamese Kingdom. Once an important centre of global diplomacy and commerce, Ayutthaya is now an archaeological ruin, with Wats (temples) and Buddhist monasteries of monumental proportions offering a glimpse of past architectural splendor.
There weren’t many people at the historical park that day, but as I walked between two Wats, a saffron-clothed monk (there’s a tradition of young men becoming monks for a short period of their lives) stared at my Talking Heads t-shirt (my tradition of having been a fan for a long period of my life). He stopped, went through the progression of lyrics in his mind, and suddenly sang out “and you may find yourself in another part of the world.” A monk of obvious musical taste, he smiled, gave me a wai greeting, and continued on his way.
I rested at a particularly old and revered temple that is nevertheless a ruin of its past, and I suddenly felt the burden of self-importance lift from my shoulders. I’m just a historical hiccup. It was, as many people smarter than I have written libraries on, a liberating moment. You don’t matter as much as you think you do, so cut yourself some slack.
This reprieve of irrelevance was a fleeting bit of relief, hard to re-capture. In the meantime, I try to recognize those once in a lifetime moments where you travel from (your) normal and gain some differing perspective. I had a few of those along the way, including one in Thailand a few weeks after visiting Ayutthaya. I was writing an article on community based tourism and had travelled to the small coastal village of Chao Mai, which sat on a broad beach, backdropped by dramatic limestone cliffs, rimmed by palm and coconut trees. While there, I slept in a small guest treehouse, the tree covered in hundreds of tiny glowbugs. At night, it was a living Christmas tree.
Chao Mai was in trouble: fish catches were declining, and so were the economic fortunes of the villagers. Nearby sea-grass beds – feeding grounds for locally caught fish – were being destroyed by commercial shrimp farming and bad fishing practices. Many were forced to migrate to Bangkok to find work in factories.
The community lobbied against the fish trawlers, switched to smaller-scale fishing gear, and created a sea-grass conservation zone. They hoped catches would soon start to increase.
I was lucky to go out on a fishing boat as it chugged past lagoons of mangrove forest to the sea-grass zone. A dugong suddenly appeared. The animal – similar to a Manatee, often nicknamed a sea-cow – had moved back into the mangrove area and been ‘adopted’ by the community and given the name Tone. Dugongs are an endangered species, and according to Thai law the government had to enforce the protection of the animal. Since dugongs fed on sea-grass, that meant conserving the sea-grass beds. Tone was helping protect the livelihood of the village.
I was encouraged to jump overboard and swim with the dugong in deeper waters. The fellow mammal swam a circle around me, under me, and then bobbed its head up into the evening air to have a look. Tone let out a slow, wet, indifferent sigh in greeting, and sunk below the surface. I climbed back into the boat, grateful to have found myself in another part of the world.
-SK
“Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down.
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground.
Into the blue again, after the money's gone.
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.”
