The End

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I suppose all stories must end at some point, and this particular one does so here. During the first week of the TEFL program, I considered cutting the whole thing short. I found the whole experience much more empty than I had hoped and there much to be done at home. After all, I had not spent a week in Denver before I left for Paris. I was seriously considering leaving, so I looked on the program website for specific information about refunds, continuing the course elsewhere, and all the specifics that quitting would entail. Pulling up that website was a strange experience. It was the same website I had stared at on so many occasions over the year, thinking of far away and exotic places, new experiences, and big things to be started abroad. In personal sense, I had so many hopes and expectations riding on this teaching certificate. All of my original reasons for doing the course came flooding back to me and they hardened my resolve. It was only a few weeks anyway. So I gritted my teeth and finished the second week. By the time the weekend rolled around, I found myself in the exact same position as the previous week. I found myself with the same objections to the program, the same things waiting for me at home, and the same decision to make. Its sounds silly to me as I write now, but I started looking for something that would make my decision for me. On Friday, I watched Lost in Translation. On Friday and Saturday, I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I called my parents. I remained unsure, ambivalent, and conflicted. I didn’t know whether to trust everything I had been hoping for before the trip or my immediate sense of discomfort with the whole situation. On Sunday, after yet another movie, I finally made up my mind: I was leaving. I took a taxi to the airport on Sunday afternoon and was back in Denver on Monday evening. The miracles of modern transportation.

Kind of an unsatisfying ending, isn’t it? Like a movie whose main actor walks off before they could shoot the final scene. It’s anticlimactic and contrasts oddly with the first hour and a half of the film. At least I was hoping for a more linear kind of build up to the whole thing. Most of all, it leaves you with more questions than answers. To tell the truth, I am only beginning to knit the whole thing together myself. The whole experience of the past two months has been so raw. The strange thing was that was what I was looking for. I felt like that red meat lover who, confidant in his love for the stuff, strides into the Texas steak joint and orders “the challenge”. You know, the steak the restaurant bets you can’t eat: the 72 oz porterhouse. He takes a bite, enjoys it. A second, and enjoys it too, but less than the first. A third, a little less than the second…Until he is three quarters of the way through and all he can think about is life without that hunk of flesh sitting on the plate before him. He wonders whether he really likes meat that much anyway. Some fresh spinach might be better. Maybe he finishes it, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he decides that he will become a vegetarian or maybe to break the world’s steak eating record, or maybe something in between. At this point I’m not sure. I did come away with one answer. It’s pretty cliché, but it’s all I’ve got. People don’t affect a place. They don’t form an experience: they are the experience. Wherever life takes you, it will be the people around you that make things alive. They will make things beautiful, ugly, miserable, peaceful, powerful, or funny. People, whether good or bad, make life real. Life without people is something that loneliness does not begin to describe: it is a non-existence, a void, and a death.

So that’s it, for the time being at least. It has meant a lot to me to have you all reading this, and I hope it’s been meaningful or entertaining in some sense. I don’t know when I’ll be on the road again, but until then…be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

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Comments

[Pat]

Shoulda stuck it out man. It has been interesting. I'll be curious to here your stories first hand and snag some of that authentic music you picked up. Traveling makes you awfully existentialist don't it?

[Will]

Jon, you're going to hate me for this, but your adventures are a lot more entertaining when you're lonley and uncomfortable. When you're having fun and everythings awesome, your journal entries tend to be descriptive affairs that leave me equally jealous and a little bored, because no words can describe something you saw unless you can effectively descirbe what it did to you. In your last two entries, your struggle with your discomfort and loneliness made you introverted. Your overt descriptions were suddenly about your personal experience with the situation, your emotions and trauma, rather than descriptions of people or places. That personal focus gave the stories a really compelling tilt. Really all I'm saying is: You should go on some miserable trips and write about em! (All the same, the whole thing was pretty damn cool)