Into the Unknown

I handed in a resume to two school boards today, with a little breathless hesitancy, covered over by my best attempt at a calm and friendly smile. I think one of the most helpful and underrated teaching techniques I’ve come by is pretending to be confident and relaxed even when you aren’t. That way at least somebody feels like you know what you’re doing.

It’s strange to be reaching the end of a chapter of my life that I’ve been in for what feels like forever, and yet also seems to have gone by so fast. After being in college and university for the past five years, the thought of finding a full time job, getting married, wading through Canada-US immigration, moving into a new place and beginning life as a couple is all a little frightening. I have nightmares of being a stay-at-home job seeker, trying desperately to get some work as a substitute teacher while Michelle and I both struggle and learn through all the things that come with life on our own. I don’t actually have nightmares — they’re more like flashes of panic in the middle of an English class or on a bus ride — the kind that I imagine might flash through the mind of someone about to jump out of the open door on their first attempt at skydiving. It’s this feeling of, “ohmygoodnessidontactuallyknowificanmakeit!”

But I can make it. The panic subsides. I reason with myself and look at all the years I’ve spent preparing to be a teacher and tell myself that I’m equipped and able to live through my first year of teaching students. I can do it. Or I think back on my first field experience of student teaching and think of how I felt after the initial newness of it all had faded — how comfortable and familiar I began to feel with the kids. I can calm myself by looking at school board websites and budgeting tools, estimating how Michelle and I will be able to make it through our first year financially. It all helps.

But ultimately I find myself looking back over the past few years. I think of all the unknowns that have now become landmarks behind me, and all the questions I once had that have since fallen into place. I think of all the desperate prayers I’ve voiced, and how they’ve been answered, in some way or another, just as the Lord desired. I think of Michelle, and the fact that, though I feel pretty unprepared to care for her and provide for us as a couple, I’ve seen the way God has cared and provided for us along the way, with each of our faltering steps. I remind myself that “thus far the Lord has helped us,” (1 Sam. 7:12) and we can know that He will continue to do so.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed about all the things that have to come together —all the details that need to be sorted out, and and all the changes that need to be adjusted to. But I know that we haven’t been alone. And I know that He who has brought us this far will lead us where we need to go, and provide for us in the moments of uncertainty and craziness. It’s exciting, exhilarating, stretching and fun, and I’m so glad I’m not alone in this journey into the unknown.

That Familiar Feeling

As soon as I get back to Pakistan, one of the first things that strikes me is always how normal it all feels. It’s been almost a year and a half since I last saw my parents, but the instant I’m here, it feels as though I never left. From the moment I saw my parents’ faces waiting outside the “Arrivals” door at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, everything has felt so familiar. At home in Hyderabad I flop onto my parents’ bed with a book, enjoying the fan, while I interrupt my dad at his desk now and then with a question, or whatever I happen to be contemplating at the time. Or I float in and out of the kitchen, talking to my mum, getting fruit from the fridge and making trips to the cooler to fill my yellow plastic KFC mug that each of us kids have had since early elementary. Everything is so familiar that I can hardly convince myself this is different, that it’s just a week of my year — a week I get to spend at home in the Sindh.

There’s something so strangely normal about finally getting where you’re going — finally sitting right there with the person you’ve waited months to spend time with, or sitting there in the car with your parents as you drive back from the airport, a year and a half later. I almost forget it wasn’t like this yesterday. And somehow I want being here to feel as foreign and special as it seemed during the months waiting to be here, but now that I’m here, it’s just not the way it is. It’s all too familiar.

But as I’ve spent these days enjoying the short time I have here in Pakistan, I’m realizing maybe unfamiliarity is overrated. The sense of exoticism, adventure and exploring new places is wonderful, but there’s something very ordinarily magical about the feeling of normal — of familiarity. To be around the people who you don’t have to be anyone with. To know and be known. To be somewhere where you just belong. That’s what home feels like.

I had to tell myself it’s okay to feel normal. While in the Sindh, I felt like I should be taking pictures or writing, to capture and communicate the beauty of the Sindh that I so enjoy, but I just couldn’t find the motivation. I wanted to share it with those who haven’t seen it or been here, but inwardly I resisted, because deep down, I didn’t want to document it. I wanted to just be. I wanted to be myself, at home — to enjoy going to visit with old friends, navigating through the crazy city traffic downtown with my dad, and lying under the dark sky of glow-in-the-dark stars that covers the roof of my room. I didn’t realize how much I just need to be sometimes — to just be thankful a place, people or a moment in silence. To let it wash over me and bask in the feeling of being home, finally.

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I’m learning to enjoy the familiar. Of course, there will always be change and feelings of newness, even in a place that’s normal. Nothing stays the same forever. Even visiting a old place comes hand in hand with some of the pains of seeing it changed and different than I left it. But I’ve realized the value of feeling normal. I’ve realized that there’s a reason the word familiar begins with “family” (almost). Because there’s something so wonderfully refreshing about being back with family, and to embrace that familiar feeling of being around the ones you love, after months and months of being apart — to belong somewhere and to belong to someone.

On Being a Student/Teacher

I don’t think I’ve ever had a semester of university where I’ve felt so conscious of how close I am to the actual responsibilities of a teacher, and yet been so acutely aware of my student-ness at the same time. It’s been the first semester where I don’t have a single class under 110 minutes (the person who thought that was a good idea obviously forgot what being in those classes was like). It’s also the first semester that I have made a conscious effort to start doodling in some of my classes, just to help me get through the class. At the same time, this is the first semester that I’ve gotten to step into a real Canadian school (since eighth grade).

My journey back into junior high has been an interesting one. So far I’ve only spent a few Fridays observing in classes, but it’s been enough to remind me of what high school is like. I’ve found that while lunch break in a junior high can look a lot like a zoo with all its enclosures open, there’s something uniquely calming about walking through that zoo a head taller than everyone else. Because as I walk through the sea of noise and bits of food or wrappers left after a messy feeding, there’s a degree of safety that comes with wearing the zoo-keeper clothes.

Of course, it’s not all crazy. One of the joys of being with junior high kids is the constant variety — the smiles as well as the snarls. It only took one boy and his brief spell of acting like a cat to bring back memories of my own junior days — when hissing at a new teacher might be thought of as a good idea — for a moment. The thing is, I remember. I remember the tangle of peer-pressure and social anxiety that junior high brought. I remember spending most of a math class colouring every other square of my page in my notebook, invoking an angry outburst of passion from my normally placid teacher in the process. I remember the joy of writing something that got that cherished praise in red pen. And I remember trying impossibly to keep up with numbers that became increasingly invaded by the fringes of the alphabet. I can remember spending whole classes drawing pictures on a graphing calculator by arranging 1’s and 0’s. I can remember filling pages of notebooks with the beginnings of stories and ideas for would-be books. I can remember what it was like to spend reading time with popular science magazines instead of “real” books, and I can remember the long hours that I spent making stop-motion powerpoint presentations that had nothing to do with school.

And now I’m here — drawing pictures in the margins of university handouts and stretching the coffee breaks as long as I can, walking back to class slowly with friends, dreading the next hour of lecture. In some ways not much has changed. I’m still that same boy. I still get tired of sitting in a chair for more than an hour at a time, and I still like talking to my classmates as much as teachers will allow. I still work harder on poems and blogs that have nothing to do with school than I do on assignments or exams — even in university.

For two more weeks I am a university student. But my place is changing. More and more often I find myself standing at the front of the classroom. Soon I’ll be the one handing out work and trying to get kids to have some interest in the lessons I’ve planned. I’ll be the one trying to convince them that school is worthwhile and that bringing a pencil to class should be a fairly routine task. A part of me is terrified — terrified that I might face students like myself, or like my classmates, when we were in junior high. But at the same time, I’m excited too, because I know. I know what it’s like to be in boring classes, and I know how fun the good ones are too. I know that most people (myself included) have things that they love and care about, which usually aren’t worksheets or homework assignments. I know these things now, and I just hope I continue to remember them. It may not make teaching any less like working in a zoo, but it just might make that zoo feel a little less strange — a little more normal.

So as I walk this strange no-man’s land between teacher and student, I hope I can see what it’s like on both sides — to remember what it was like being an animal in a zoo, running through the halls, so that when I’m the zookeeper, and I’m the one despairing over spaghetti smeared onto the floor, I can smile at the sloths slouching against the walls and remember what it was like to be them.

Re-member

Disconnect, re-connect. Touch down, take off. Sleep. Sleep some more. Recently, life has just been a whirlwind of moving. It’s been almost a month since I slept in my own room. Instead, I’ve been all over the place on beds, floors and couches, a few sleeps at a time. Now I’m back. Still not in my bed, but in my house at least. And while in some ways it’s good to get back into routine, In other ways, routine is hard. I’m faced with the job of reconnecting — of going back to classes, meeting people, doing homework, doing laundry, and trying to return to “normal”. Only, normal isn’t always where my heart would like to be.

A week ago today, I said goodbye to my girlfriend, Michelle, and boarded a plane back to Alberta and my life in Edmonton. These few days have been filled with remembering. Re-membering. I’ve never really thought about the word before. I suppose it’s the opposite of dismemberingcutting off a persons limbs, dividing them or tearing them apart, as Oxford Dictionary of English puts it. Time and distance, they both seem to dismember. Whether it’s people, places, or things, separation hurts as distance pulls apart, muddies memories and fades recollections. But I re-member — piecing together the fragments of memory, attempting to undo the separation — to somehow preserve.

I have a pair of mittens Michelle wore a few times when I was with her, when her hands were freezing and her gloves weren’t warm enough to help. Now they smell like her, and if I hold them to my nose and close my eyes, I’m almost there. Almost with her. I remember. I walk back through memories, attempting to freeze a moment or hold on to a thought, a smile or a word. I stop reading mid-sentence in a book Michelle lent me, to trace the folded crease in the corner of the page — knowing that her fingers were there a few weeks ago, folding that spot to mark the page. I use a note from her as a bookmark — a note from our short time in Montana, left on the door for me when I arrived late at night. “We’re glad you’re here,” it ended. A little smiley face peeks out at me from where it sticks out of my book. I cherish the pieces — all the little dismembered fragments.

I fear the way memories seem to slip away in time, and fade. It’s getting harder to smell the scent on the mittens now. Before long they’ll be back to being “normal”, and I’ll start wearing them again, and stop trying to preserve that little hint of a memory. Thankfully Skype, letters, emails and pictures make up for that fading smell. They fill that space between the next plane ticket and the next goodbye. They help the remembering.

I remember. I try with so many things. I try desperately to preserve Pakistan in my mind, to gather together memories in a room somewhere in my heart, where I can go back and walk through them all, hoping they haven’t changed. I hoard the memories together, as many as I can, so they’ll be there, somewhere. But they always change. Change is inevitable. Memory is fluid, and fragile, just like the hearts it lives in. I find comfort in a verse Michelle shared with me this week – in knowing that there’s One who never forgets, whose memories don’t fade, and who isn’t dismembered by time or distance. And even when my foolish heart forgets, I am remembered.

Shout for joy, O heavens! And rejoice, O earth!
Break forth into joyful shouting, O mountains!
For the Lord has comforted His people
And will have compassion on His afflicted.
But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me,
And the Lord has forgotten me.”
“Can a woman forget her nursing child
And have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.
“Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands;
Your walls are continually before Me.

Isaiah 49:13-16

Life in Pieces: the Attempt of Life Writing

This paper was something I wrote for an English class in university. Thanks to a flexible teacher, and an open invitation for an assignment, I was able to have a lot of fun and tackle a topic that was really meaningful to me. We were asked to write for an audience other than our professor, and to write in a style that would be appropriate for our chosen venue. So, with her permission, I wrote for my blog. I’ve changed some of citation formatting used in the original paper, but other than that, here it is:

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Life in Pieces: the Attempt of Life Writing

“Where are you from?” The question seemed to suck the air out of the room. Pictures and memories filled my mind. The home that I grew up in. The dusty streets I played in. School in the mountains. Fog and rain hovering over the trees as the monsoons poured from the skies. Too many memories. Then, in Canada, there was my grandparents’ house. Summers spent picking raspberries and running to the community pool.

“Three Hills, Alberta.” It was simpler. No need to explain the torrent of memories with its confusing variety of places. Three Hills was a piece of the truth. A small piece. The real truth was too messy. Where am I from? The answer, if there was one, was in stories — memories and pieces. But people don’t want pieces, they want history. A history that can be fit on a page.

History is not just the story you read. It is the one you write. It is the one you remember or denounce or relate to others. It is not predetermined. Every action, every decision, however small, is relevant to its course… (plaque in Canadian War Museum, Ottawa)

27 December 2007.

Benazir Bhutto is assassinated in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. A man levelled a gun at her as she was leaving a rally, standing in the skylight of a car. She was shot twice — once in the neck. A few seconds later, a second man detonated a bomb he was wearing. Almost two dozen people around the car were killed in the blast.

I remember standing in the darkness on our roof, staring out over Hyderabad at the glow from burning tires, dancing on the walls of apartment buildings nearby. There were people shouting. I could see a figure walking in the dark street below, carrying a large tv he had looted from a store. We had a small stack of loose bricks on the roof. I can’t even remember what we ever used them for. But that night I asked my dad if I could throw one down from the roof. I was fourteen. I suppose it made sense to me at the time. Looters were in the streets below. Justice could be mine to deal out in the form of a brick. They wouldn’t even know where it came from. It would just drop on them out of the darkness. I’m glad my dad said no.

We had people over at our house for a late Christmas get together. They ended up staying the night since it was too dangerous to go home in the rioting. They slept in different rooms around our house. It was like a multi-family sleepover. My dad drove a few families back to their homes in the quiet of the early morning, when the chaos had died down. Soon after, the rioting started again, and no one could go anywhere.

History remembers the death of the first female Prime Minister of the Muslim world. I remember the fires burning across the city. I remember a brick.

History, like narrative, becomes, therefore, a process, not a product. It is a lived experience for both reader and writer (Hutcheon 306).

Prairie Heart

I long to see that surging ocean
of grasses in the breeze,
I long to hear the gentle winds
wash o’er the emerald seas.

I long to gaze across the world
and see where sky meets earth,
I long to breathe the moving air,
that gives my life rebirth.

I long to be on that pleasant sea,
the true pacific calm,
I long to ride the waves of grass,
where a prairie heart is home.

I wrote these lines four years ago. I hadn’t even left Pakistan yet. I never would have written them today. There’s something naive about them — not just in the style, but in the longing. I never actually had a prairie heart. I had pictures from Grandma and Grandpa. Memories from the long drives across Canada the few times we were visiting “home.”

Reading these lines now, I realize what I wanted most. Not to be home in Canada — it felt the least like home — but just to have a home. To belong somewhere. I suppose I thought I could write home into existence. I thought I could write a past I didn’t have. I wanted to be the prairie boy missing home — but I was a boy whose only prairies were the yellow fields I saw in calendars from Canada, hanging on the wall by the light switches in my parents’ bedroom.

***

“You grew up in Pakistan?” At some point the question gets old. I always know what comes next. I’ve it so many times before — that question that was never thought through enough before it came bumbling out of someone’s mouth in an effort to understand. “Pakistan, eh? What was that like?” What was it like? What was eighteen years of my life like? What was eighteen years of travelling, learning, living, loving like?

“Good.” The answer usually seemed as empty as the question. Though, at least they tried. I’m never sure what kind of answer was expected. A quick history of my life? A few colourful descriptors for a country they didn’t know or understand? I never know.

“To write of anyone’s history is to order, to give form to disparate facts; in short, to fictionalize. […] narrativization is a form of human comprehension, a way to impose meaning and form on the chaos of a historical event.” (Hutcheon 302)

We went to a lot of museums, growing up. I would usually run ahead, looking at all the displays while my parents read the descriptions on the exhibits. I wasn’t as patient. History was what I could see — old tools, pottery, weapons, and clothes. Objects from years passed. Objects from foreign places. History. I would stare at them through the glass where they sat protected, contained, preserved; their labels and descriptions filling in the gaps between seeing and understanding.

***

I had a small bug collection given to me when I was a boy. Someone was passing on the small selection: a scorpion, a few butterflies, a large centipede, and a few others. Each of them were impaled with tiny pins to keep them on their display. I always wanted to add to it. I would catch butterflies with all their vibrant colours, wanting to keep them forever and preserve them on my board.

But I was never able to add one to my collection. I couldn’t bear to kill them — to stick that pin through in that piercing act of documentation. And so my board never got more bugs. I can’t even remember what happened to it. It used to sit up on a shelf with its small rows of exoskeletons, collecting dust.

I would try to draw the butterflies instead; sketching the intricate veins that traced through the wings, trying to bring them to life with crayola colouring pencils, as best as my sixth grade scribbling could do. But even these were a flat replica at best. The butterflies were always most beautiful when I saw them free, resting on a flower — their vibrant mosaics opening and closing to reveal their kaleidoscope wings.

My grandparents have a glass display of butterflies at their house, hanging on the wall by the back door. Sometimes I take it off the wall to look at the wings from the other side — the hidden side, with their subdued browns and earthy tones.

Memory

A few days
its deep purple petals
splash their vibrance — a radiant violet
sunset.

But too soon
the stem begins to feel its scar.
Like dried blood, its colour
browns.

In time
each pale and crinkled tissue drops
until only a skeleton stem remains.
It too, soon,
will fade

It took me a while to begin peeling back the layers of memories from Pakistan. I had realized it was easier to be Canadian for conversations. It wasn’t worth having to explain my life story to everyone. Besides, it usually didn’t explain anything.

But alone, on paper I would sink into the recesses of memory — to look at scars of memories I had covered up because they were too complicated to talk about. Good scars. I began to write the stories — to order the places, people, and words. In his book Running in the Family Michael Ondaatje wrote, “History is organized” (p. 26). But people aren’t. Most times my stories don’t seem to have any order at all. They’re just pieces. Good times. Hard times.

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I used to push back against anything Canadian in me. There was a feeling that accepting the fact that I was here now would mean rejecting the fact that I was ever anywhere else. It was either one or the other. So what was I? Pakistani? Canadian? Both; and yet somehow neither.

Somewhere along the way I accepted that I would never be Canadian. I’d never be Pakistani either. I’d just be stuck somewhere in the middle. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe being stuck in one or the other was what I feared most — the fear that kept me drifting.

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To write self-reflexively of history as a process in progress, instead of as a completed product, is to breakdown the finality of the formal narrative closure. (Hutcheon 312)

Today, some of the confusion has left. I’m still faced with the impossibility of trying to mediate a past full of memories and experiences that seem to escape me. I try to write glimpses and fragments of a world I can never really capture.

Somehow there is solace in the past. There’s something both frightening and exhilarating about reaching back into memories — rearranging, reordering, reliving. I wonder sometimes if it’s really the past I’m trying to understand or if it’s actually the present. Maybe I’m just ordering the pieces of myself, trying to make sense of it all. But in the end, there’s often little sense to be made. There’s no real story to tell, no lesson — just pieces. Pieces that, in some ways, die the instant they’re put on a page — contained and preserved, their angular skeleton strokes lying in neat rows of letters. They become lifeless, ordered history.

The stories we live are rarely like the stories we read — like those in we find in history. We may try to lay out and describe a person, down to the last bone of their body, but the result is never a person. The Japanese have a style of painting called hatsuboku, or “splashed ink”, where artists splatter ink onto a page and then paint with what is is on the paper — the little drops of black ink, waiting come to life. You have little control over how the paint gets on the page — only what you paint with it once it’s there. Life writing tends to be similar. We don’t choose the events that happen to us, but we make the best of what we are given and paint a picture as well as we can.

Despite the failures of writing in capturing life, there’s something valuable about it as well. It’s a chance to learn and make sense of the jumble of memories and experiences that make up a person. The finished product will be far from the actual life, but it will be an attempt — at best, a sketch of a butterfly with crayola colouring pencils. Like Michael Ondaatje said of his Running in the Family: “The book again is incomplete”(p. 201). Life writing will always be incomplete. It’s only ever an endeavour, in scraps and pieces, glimpses and glances, to capture the life of a person and the memories that make them who they are.

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Quotes taken from:

Hutcheon, Linda. “Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge.” Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Ed. Sam Solecki. Montréal, Canada: Véhicule, 1985. Print.

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Print.