Adventures to a New Mind
Visited a new country, felt my personal world eclipsed by the vastness of its seemingly prehistoric world — here’s an account of it.
Travelling is meant to be a pleasant, lulling break from the repetitive rhythms of regular, invariably demanding life. In the embrace of a new landscape, culture and people, daily anxieties back home are forgotten, and one falls into a mental break that, by the end of the vacation, instills a sense of hopefulness and newness.
This is what I’ve come to know of travel, not through personal experience, but through those illustrations that idealistic thinking tends to paint. You see, I don’t travel much, and my remembering present self associates the few vacations I have been on to an alternate experiencing self who lacked the consciousness and thought to make something of them.
In essence, ‘I’ have never been on a vacation.
So, I naturally figured that on the next occasion that I do find myself boarding a plane, I would feel a fervent sense of chilled-out laziness as soon as I slid down the comforts of my economy-class seat, a sense that would finally let me have my much-sought-after mental reboot.
Of course, if previous experiences have taught me anything, it is that seldom can idealistic thinking rightly predict the reality; ironically enough, the cautious optimism with which I hung on idealistic thinking proved fortuitous on my recent trip to Cambodia.
The only comfort that Cambodia afforded me was during bedtime after a busy day; the only moment of laziness I could steal was a 30-minute massage; the only time I felt pleasant was when I met the breeze’s consoling touch after a day of being struck by nearly millennium-year old architecture, the mere existence of which besieged my concept of time as something that waits for nothing. Clearly, these monuments didn’t care for that concept.
Laziness and pleasantness were the last comforts I would find, yet what I learned through my thought-provoking journey was nothing short of a mental transformation.
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We travelled to Siem Reap, a resort town in northwestern Cambodia. We were there for 5 days, and the visit mainly consisted of eating, sight-seeing and sleeping; funnily enough, it seems to me that my family and I placed the utmost value on food, spending an hour on every meal, and 10 minutes before that deciding on where we’d want to eat. I didn’t mind that because I love food, and Khmer cuisine — the traditional Cambodian cuisine — was a literal treat to have; I went into the country despising the pungent smell of fish, but returned a fan of the same smell, which now brings back sparkling memories I’ve haven’t experienced of a sea I haven’t ventured.
Sight-seeing dragged us to the most popular tourist locations and experiences: Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Night Market, Old Street, Tonlé Sap, and the Phare Circus. Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom are, to say the least, the most beautiful and spiritually inundating collection of temples. They’re complemented by the Night Market and Old Street, which offer a more willingly digestible form of Cambodia — its art and cuisine. Tonlé Sap is a surprisingly large lake with several houseboats, many owned by Vietnamese who have illegally settled in Cambodia and cannot own land.
The Phare Circus was the first circus I’ve ever experienced — not just seen, but experienced. The show we saw revolved around the theme, ‘Same Same But Different’, offering an insight into how Cambodians perceive the differences and similarities between tourists and themselves, and successfully captured what it aimed to with its talented — and inanely passionate — performers. I use ‘inanely’ because I doubt I’ve seen live performers with a comparably impassioned zeal as they possessed; I say this because one of their acts, which explored the implications of Westernisation on their local culture, made me feel sadness in a way I had not anticipated. In a circus. Achieving that in the laughter that succeeded and preceded that act isn’t easy, but Phare was clearly indifferent to that affectation.
All in all, this is what constituted of my physical exposure to Cambodia; and throughout my moments with the physical past of an unseen world, I had been viscerally affected with new realisations: realisations about the nature of the ancient and its conflict with the present (which is more of a side-thought); realisations about the nature of life (which is most of what I will elucidate now). Although my faith in these realisations is somewhat cautious — I’m only basing them on what I’ve learnt in Cambodia — I still feel that in a parallel world, were I less naive and had approached the same conclusions, I would’ve addressed them. All thoughts are worth an exploration, and I’ve learnt this lesson too often to ignore it.
The way I approached life before Cambodia (let’s refer to that as BC now) was typical: get good marks, make good memories, eat good food, socialise with good people, and have good fun (and in the future, find a good job and start a good family). Like most people, I was obsessed with attaining the ‘good’.
Sure, the definition of what’s good differs across people (some use ‘great’, some use ‘best’ and some may use ‘adequate’ in its place). However, the will to seek it is often similar, and the vision that seasons this will is often immediate and capricious.
In other words, the will to attaining the ‘good’ is coupled with the vision of ‘never stop striving for what you desire’ and ‘there’ll always a way!’. Such a vision builds perseverance, constructs a time that moves faster, and eventually, promotes a race against a parallel self of the person (which exists at the same time, but lacks this vision) to give its holder what they want: the good.
However, this vision can also be myopic, in the sense that an exigent pursuit of a ‘good’ after another ‘good’ leads to nothing but everlasting sprints behind something that assumes a new meaning every time it is attained. Every fervent sprint is concerned with what is to come immediately next, and in so doing, the individual seeks small (and perhaps inevitable) achievements instead of a grand (and at first, apparently impossible) achievement.
The loom of this vision is familiar to me: I’ve forever been concerned with what I would choose as a career, which, trust me, isn’t uncommon for 16-year-olds who love science , but are unsure of what most piques their interest. College applications start this year, and heck, I’m eager to find out what my undergraduate major is going to be. As for life after college, I speculated that I would simply and passionately pursue what my field of study would turn out to be. Then, I supposed I’d be fine with a well-paying job, and move on to live a relatively stressless life, with enough time for my other interests: music, reading, and the lovely pursuit of cross-disciplinary knowledge.
However, while I was, BC (remember the acronym?), defining these little goals on the basis of distinct phases, I’d never thought to define a broader goal, a ‘connective tissue’ that would be embedded in the skeleton of my life. Here I was, thinking I had 20/20 vision because I didn’t wear spectacles, yet no one had ever told me that I suffered from another chronic myopia, which affected not my eyes, but my being.
Where was the bigger picture? Nowhere to be found, of course. In the course of setting these little goals that appear cute in front of the millennium-old temples of Cambodia, I never had a larger aim.
I want to blame this on city life. Buildings are present in literally every turn of the eye, and if they aren’t, you can bet it’s because a similar-coloured road has been paved to guide you between them. You never get to feel small because these buildings haven’t done anything grand: they haven’t survived for centuries, nor have they witnessed a world with no semblance of today’s advanced constructions and innovations. What do these buildings know of worlds which they can only imagine, but which those grand temples reminisce of everyday? Nothing at all!
These buildings are, of course, an immediate reminder of ‘good’ and ‘advancement’. They, too, are affected with pesky ol’ myopia, and that is what I was always subconsciously reminded of. Unfortunately, my only exposure to a world constructed by time instead of ‘good’ ‘advancements’ came 16 years into life. Innately, I constructed my world in a similar way.
This is where Cambodia came in. It exposed me to what ages of time can do. Its large temples continue to boast of intricately-drawn carvings, which have largely, but not entirely, stood the tough test of time and weathering, and collectively with the statues of Bayon Temple at Angkor Thom, which appeal to me as semblances of individual serenity and acceptance, serve as a reminder of the bigger picture: the bigger picture that exists outside the usual myopic vision of the world — not only in terms of time, but also in terms of space.
Insofar as physique is concerned, these monuments aren’t at their peak (49 statues were built at the Bayon temple, but 37 stand now), but whatever they are today is equally mesmerising, in equal parts due to their furtively acquired wisdom and the fact that my footsteps are on the same grounds as those of millennium-old fellow humans who themselves cease to exist.
Admittedly, I realise that these monuments didn’t have a vision either, but that doesn’t change the fact that they have transformed over time. They’ve become what they are today after ages of yesterdays. Isn’t that beautiful?
AC (After…, the acronym strikes again!), I’ve stringently strived to avoid the tunnel vision. My vision is committed to finding my connective tissue and thereafter implementing it. The hope is that, by guiding my story, it will become an ingrained motive for all that I intend to act on and achieve. In a way, I’m foreseeing my destiny, but without the certainty of it coming to fruition.
All I know is, I’ll give it my all.
(a quaint painting and a little side-thought below)
Something to remind myself of my vision; you can bet that I spend more time looking at this jungle than at the concrete jungle outside.
*** Side-thought ***
Siem Reap houses temples that are almost thousand-years old, yet the major industry on which it sustains its economy is the relatively-modern tourism sector. Furthermore, the dominant Khmer culture that exists there has proliferated for over 1000 years, yet a looming threat in the country is the sprawl of Western culture, trends and ideals, which was also echoed in the Phare Circus’s story, “Same Same But Different”. The perennial, traditional Cambodia is being vanquished by the brand-new, trendy West, and here is a clear reflection of the conflict of the past with the present: while the Cambodians live off of their Khmer past, they are adopting the Western life. I might be overstating the problem, but I think that the sheer presence of Fortnite-themed tuk-tuks and the spiralling popularity of non-indigenous clothing in Cambodia attests to this change. Will it get worse, or will it improve?