2 Questions Every Girl is Asking Herself

Chapter 34

I looked out the window, we're above clouds now. An enormous open mouth of the volcano rose just above a blanket of fluffy whites. Which made me think of a molten lava cake. But there's no lava (which is a good thing). And then I remembered, that's right, Bali sits on active volcanoes.  

This volcano is the same one I saw against the skyline at sunset in Sanur. Ocean in the foreground, volcano in the background, the sky was painted in a soft hue of all shades of the rainbow. You start with blue connecting with the ocean, and gradually work your way up to lavender, baby pink, apricot, yellow, pale green, and then blue again blending in nicely with the sky.

I'd never paid this close attention to sunsets before. And marveled at all the different shades of color twilight contained. You don't have to wait for the sun and rain to mingle in just the right way to see the rainbow. You can find it in the afterglow of sunset every day. And this view, it occurred to me, looked just like our sunsets in Vancouver: ocean in the foreground, mountain in the background. Swap the volcano with the Pacific Rockies, and we're back in Vancouver. The silhouettes are remarkably familiar.

It struck me how rarely I visited the beach or watched the sunset in Vancouver, even though it was so close by, practically at my fingertips, and how silly it is to fly thousands of miles to see what I could easily see at home.

I wondered if this is the lesson I'm meant to learn, that I should cherish what I already have. I thought perhaps I should scold myself, for not appreciating the sunsets in Vancouver. I decided right there and then, I must take myself to the beach and watch lots of sunsets once I get back...I was already daydreaming about Vancouver sunsets:

In the orange glow of the setting sun, I take a sip of Starbucks coffee, the shimmering waves -

Uh uh.

I chopped the thought in mid-sentence. Seriously, how many sunsets will I actually watch before life got in the way?

The sand in Bali isn't whiter, the sunsets aren't more spectacular, even the ocean isn't that much warmer (at least not around the time I was visiting), yet I don't regret coming here. I never wished I hadn't come. I wouldn't have created the time and space to give serious questions serious consideration, let alone experimentation, back at home. Of course, not everyone is like this. Some people can resolve existential crisis in their stolen moments. But I couldn't. I couldn't leave behind the busy commotion of routine, the idea of my identity, the purposes I served, the lifestyle I must lead, the productivity I need to achieve, the amount of idleness I can tolerate before feeling like slapping myself.

I mean when am I going to formulate a proper answer to the question "What am I going to do with my life?" Before my 7AM carpool to work in Palo Alto on an empty stomach? Or after?

Throughout the consulting years, I did think about it a lot. On flights. Late at night. Alone in my hotel bed. I bought myself a pretty little notebook, where I began working on a bucket list/career options. I put the feelers out there for new jobs (all business related). Writing didn't even make it onto that list. I couldn't articulate the thought.

It was as if the thought wasn't important enough to be documented on the page, kind of like how in rural Pakistan, girls' names aren't documented on the family tree. Malala Yousafzai (the girl who was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for speaking up for women's education) has five aunts, yet on their family tree, a 300 year old document, females simply do not exist. My dream, which appeared as flashes of thought, didn't exist on paper either.

Thoughts in their infancy aren't really voices. They are just whispers. They are so easy to be drowned out by other louder, surer voices. To put your whisper against other people's well thought-out opinions, it'd be like throwing your toddler in the ring against a well-trained samurai. But whispers don't have to remain whispers. After a kind dose of attention, they become a voice, which one can articulate, after study/experience they strengthen into opinion, which one can speak of with conviction. I don't care how many people try to sit you down and prove to you through analysis or reports or first-hand experience, that your dream is irrational, impractical, impossible, it is still, their truth. The fastest, surest way to have your very own custom-made, special-ordered truth, is to experiment.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote: "Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living. It's the difference between knowing something in your head and experiencing it with your whole being. Only your whole being can experience higher forces as real."

Sometimes, the most outrageous ideas that you leave on the back burner (because they are too outrageous to be on the front burner), once felt, don't seem so outrageous anymore. After it is felt, you suddenly have the wherewithal to just go for it, (because you have already kindda gone for it, in a mini way, in the form of the experiment).  Evanka Osmak, just to name an example, gave up her safe engineering gig to become a Sportsnet news anchor. Which is doubly "outrageous" because Hello? An engineer turned sports news anchor? And a girl in a male dominated world? But you can find her now every night, at 9 o'clock sharp, front and center, on Sportsnet news. It all started when she experimented with a 3-month broadcasting course. Within a week, she knew.

After flying half way around the world to escape the constraints of my own mind, I too, have felt my truth. Let me be clear, it is not to say I'll never have another purpose, or have new goals. But this is the direction I wish to commit to now, the center from which I shall rebuild my life.