Cathedral Square, Santiago de Compostela
Travel away from the normative environment that we've grown blind to and we see the world with new eyes. Traveling for me is both exciting and stressful. Away from home I don't have the daily routines that comfort and inure. I go to bed and wake up at different times, to different places. As simple a change as this turns my world upside down.
The Go Ahead Travel group to Barcelona and Northern Spain was composed of retired people, a few who still worked part-time but were for the most part retired, too. My sister was the sole person who still worked full time. When people asked me, I told them the same fable: I was on a sabbatical nearing two years. One co-traveler was a social worker therapist in New York. Merma opined: The good thing about being a psychiatrist is you can work as long as you want. She was referring to the comparatively less physical demand of working as a psychiatrist or therapist. One worked with the mind, usually comfortable sitting in a chair across from the patient or client.
For all intents I am retired. I just didn't want to acknowledge the fact. I am retired in the way I live one day after another. But I am also retired in a whole new way. I can consider other tasks and challenges being a regular member of the social-security-paying, economy-propping American citizenry I couldn't see or undertake.
One idea that struck me after I came home last Tuesday night was to look into moving my giant collection of books, DVDs, and CDs to a not-for-profit library/media center in the Philippines. I left the Philippines because I wanted access to a larger world where individual differences would be seen as valuable when the whole was seen completely. I felt odd in the small-world mentality where I grew up and lived. I stuck out and looked weird. I found the larger world in America. America is a big country but the vastness of the world humans lived, dreamt and experienced was to be discovered not in the coast-to-coast geography but in the books and media the country supported. The Fourth Estate is not just journalism and newspapers and magazines. The Fourth Estate comprises the various ways we communicate ideas. Today this is inexorably moving into the non-spatial realm of digital media and the Internet but in the 1970s when I first came I found the mind-expanding world in books and the arts and diverse cultures of the New World.
Books, digital media and the Internet are the vehicle by which I could help other Filipinos who like me don't fit in the narrow world of traditional Philippine society. I have this embarrassingly huge collection of media, too big for one man to use and digest. It can be a boon to a whole lot of other people.
The mind is a awful thing to waste, says a group encouraging educational opportunities for what used to be referred to as "Negroes" in America. I've long harped on values being central to how a person lives. I believe it is vital to the transformation our global societies require for people to have access to the total pool of history and culture that belong to us all. With this knowledge maybe we can move past sectarianism and begin to cooperate as one species inhabiting one small planet moving in a giant universe.
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