The journey within I’ve met people who, much to my envy, were not on a mission to find themselves. Whether it’s just their nature, or that they’ve managed to find the answer already, some people seem to know their purpose and have known it for a long time. Perhaps there are some people who just don’t ask.
I am not one of those people, and that is why I have found myself in the desert. My decision to leave my familiar surroundings and venture abroad was a selfish one wrapped in the packaging of helping others, which I’ve accepted now. I may not have freely admitted that fact, or even known it, in the beginning. But I’m primarily an English teacher in Jordan because I was on a mission to help myself. It just looks as though I’m helping others, and that’s the naked truth.
It’s not completely one-sided, as I certainly like my students and I know they appreciate what I do. To be honest, I’d rather have fun with them kicking a ball around a dusty alleyway than teach them grammar. I’m the world’s worst at class management, and I’m surprised I haven’t been fired yet. They just haven’t caught onto me. Hopefully I will have mastered the art before that happens.
I’m not wholly selfish, either. I commit random acts of selflessness quite often. I’ve given an old laptop to a neighbour who could barely afford a desk to put it on. I’ve had newfound friends round to the house for dinner, even though I burnt it and had to get takeaway. And I’m earning very low wages, doing work for which I’d be paid many times more back home. Does that count as selfless?
I’ve come to terms with the fact that finding yourself is an endless mission if you allow it to be. If you never answer the questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is my purpose in life?’, it’s not because there isn’t an answer. It’s because you don’t want to know the answer, because then what you would do after finding it? Or, if you find the answer, it means you have to commit to it. Our generation is not used to commitment. So many of us let opportunities slip through our fingers because we’re too scared to say ‘That’s me. That’s who I am’. Or we say it, then change our minds a month down the road, ending up more lost than before.
The journey has clearly had a profound effect on me. I’ve endured dust storms for days on end to learn what it is that I want from life. I’ve been on bus rides that took an hour to go a couple of kilometres because the streets were jammed with traffic. I can’t complain, because it’s part of what I wanted, and I’m beginning to think it’s the journey itself that I seek, not the destination. Can’t that be something to aspire to be - a seeker of journeys, of questions without answers, of beginnings without ends?
I sense that most of my colleagues have travelled down this road and reached the end of it, but have become cynical in the process. My favourite colleague - the one I envy the most - has never even asked the question. He’s simply a lover of adventure who likes to blow his own trumpet. True, he boasts too much about how great a teacher he is, but his energy and zest for life are refreshing. He definitely falls into the category of ‘doer’ not ‘thinker’. That’s not to say he doesn’t think, of course, but he spends very little time sorting out his thoughts. It doesn’t seem that he needs to. |