Chaos is Beautiful

I still owe you a “catch-up” post, dear readers, but the writer’s urge calls yet, so bear with me. This post just wrote itself on my walk home from a workout at the pool I go to. Here goes.

My Facebook stalkers will note that I’ve just had “one of the most interesting weeks of my life.” Really it’s been the past two weeks that have been particularly interesting. What the heck do I mean by that tell-nothing word “interesting,” you ask? Well, a lot of things. The past two weeks have been inspiring at times and frustrating and disappointing at others; sometimes super fun and sometimes somewhat more solitary; without question very random throughout, and above all, illuminating. I can say I have learned a lot about myself during the month of September.

Study abroad programs explain to their participants that the best way to understand the phenomenon of “culture shock” while being abroad is to know you’ll experience a roller coaster of emotions: happy as can be one minute, homesick the next. Sometimes you feel at home and like a quasi-native in your host country, and other times you’re a tourist like the rest of them. I’ve felt all of the roller coaster emotions recently, and the interesting thing is that I’ve felt them all at the same time.

I’ve made absolutely incredible friends here, ones who will be in my life for a long time, at the same time that I sorely miss my family and my best buds from home. The past month has been the best yet on the work front, so I’m motivated and excited to keep it going; but I’m also looking forward to the exciting things I’ll do while working back in the U.S. And at the same time that I can say for sure that Argentina is now my second home, and that I’ll be coming back, I also know the U.S. is my first one, and I’m excited to come home in December. (That should be comforting news to those of you who have expressed fear and trepidation at my secret plan to marry an Argentine woman and buy land in the mountains in the northwest of Argentina. The search for an Argentine bride continues, but seeing as I have less than three months left here, it doesn’t look good. Rest assured, people.)

It may seem strange to be reflecting on my time here in such a concluding tone, but these are the realizations that have been coming to me lately. I’ve hit the six-month mark, and at this point I’ve had time to really put things in perspective. The perspective is this: I’m incredibly lucky to have had this experience, and I’m equally lucky to have such good friends and family to come home to. That realization, in particular, came to me last night. I was sitting on a bench in one of the quirkiest plazas I’ve seen in Buenos Aires. I had been walking around for a couple of hours, jamming to my iPod and deep in thought about how strange and fun the past couple of weeks have been. I wandered into this plaza, which is only four blocks from my new apartment (I moved, by the way) but which I had never seen before because it’s buried several blocks away from the main avenue.

The second I turned the corner and saw the plaza, I knew it was my new favorite place in this city. On the outskirts of the plaza there were the typical Buenos Aires street performers, darting in front of cars stopped at red lights to juggle flashing, glow-in-the-dark pins in the twilight. Two guys in partial drag were doing a synchronized dance and shaking their booties for the idling cars. There were teenagers with skateboards and these crazy new thingies that I have no idea what to call except for the skateboard's distant cousin, or a mix between a skateboard and roller skates. (If I can't name these things, and I have a hard time even describing them, does that mean I'm getting old? Scary thought.) I sat myself down on a bench in the middle of the plaza, facing a Gothic cathedral and watching people pour out of the front of the sanctuary after an evening service. A bunch of ten-year-old Argentine rascals were playing a helter-skelter game of soccer right in front of the cathedral. I returned their ball a few times when it flew in my direction, as did my fellow plaza-goers who were busy drinking mate (that’s the tea Argentines drink out of a special gourd with a special straw in a special way). Meanwhile, I was half dodging sticks and tennis balls being launched toward me from the other direction – there was a group of twenty-somethings playing fetch with their pack of dogs (there must have been eight canines), and they were rocketing their sticks and balls the entire length of the plaza, over trees and people. The sticks would land right in front of me, and the pack of pups would race through the plaza and come screeching to a halt at my feet in order to claim their prizes. One time the dogs swarmed a woman who was passing through and accidently kicked one of the sticks they were chasing. Once the woman escaped the herd she looked like she couldn’t decide whether to scream, curse, cry, or run for her life. She had a wild look in her eyes, and I was so amused I think she thought I was partly at fault for the fracas.

In the midst of all this beautiful chaos, a man suddenly approached me. He signaled for me to take out my headphones, and he asked if I would buy the mini-packs of tissues he was selling. I was off my guard, and I didn’t catch everything he said, but he kept repeating “con todo respeto” – with all respect – and he pointed to his son and daughter he had in tow. The kids must have been 6 and 8. I bought a pack of tissues, told him to keep the change, and watched him wander through the plaza with his kids and disappear around the bend. After I had bought the tissues, and before he gathered his kids and left me in solitude on my bench, he repeated it one more time: “con todo respeto.” He could tell I was deep in thought, and he was apologizing for interrupting me, I think. That “con todo respeto” really struck me. I don't know if I can explain why, but let me try.

I have a real aversion to words like “respect” – to me, the concept of respect (in English or in Spanish) has a standoffish, hardnosed, even authoritarian connotation. You can treat someone both respectfully and very austerely/coldly at the same time: to show someone respect is not the same as to care about him or her. I prefer to treat someone with compassion than with respect. When I was working at the behavioral school in Holyoke, I avoided telling students they had to “respect” me because I was a (substitute) teacher. I chose to put it differently: I told them it was important that they learn and grow, and that I was there to help them do that. "Respecting the rules" isn't as important to me as understanding why there are rules in the first place. What this man selling tissues did was change the way I think about respect, both as a word and as a concept. He respected my experience of sitting and thinking deeply on my bench; and I respected his experience, too – although there’s no way for him to have known that. We respected each other and each other’s experiences. There may have been compassion involved in the exchange, but he seemed more interested in giving and receiving respect than appealing to an emotion like compassion. In that sense, an old phrase from my 2009 trip to New Orleans comes to mind: "not charity - solidarity." And as Ranger Fred from Jean Lafitte National Park in New Orleans put it: that's a beautiful thing.