Privilege, Honesty, and Balance | Daily Thought-Storm 2
Woe is me, reader. I have to wash my clothes by hand again today. This town’s still closed for business, and my apartment contains no laundry machine, refrigerator, or dishwasher. I can’t call in a housekeeper, either. What a drag. I’ve lived in more spartan conditions in the past, though most of that could be summarized as camping or unnecessary self-inflicted hardship. Being real, I’m a privileged person living abroad in a small town, the locals here grow a crapload of potatoes. I haven’t had to worry about basic needs.
It’s embarrassing how good I’ve got it, all things considered. I have a laptop and smartphone, friends and family who will provide a place to sleep if needed, and I have an embassy. These are luxuries that far outweigh the time-consuming chore of washing my own clothes.
The shutdown of business-as-usual has been humbling for me, it’s revealed so much about what matters most and what doesn’t matter at all. In isolation, I’ve found more proof of how lucky I am, given that the world is keeling over, and I don’t think I’ll be the only one to mature through this troubling experience. But then, I imagine that just as many will sink into video games and Netflix binges and completely miss the opportunity to grow, learn a new skill, or read a good book. I fall into the latter part of that scale at times — I watch a lot of Jojo these days.
Though while I consume information throughout the day, I break it up with blocks of mindfulness activities like yoga and meditation. It won’t go any good to shame yourself for watching a movie during lockdown (possibly better than being glued to mainstream media), the gold here is in finding balance. Break down your weekly and daily routine, figure out where your time is going. Time is the most precious asset you’ve got, don’t misallocate it. Easier said than done, but there’s a shortcut if you don’t know where to start. Balance is found by being honest with yourself.
I’ve been burned several times through being honest with myself and others, but the pain is necessary for me to grow, and when you are honest with others, it creates the opportunity for them to do the same. Every place in my life where I am dishonest is the approximate location of the most fear, anxiety, and regret.
Several years ago, a friend of mine tossed a lime green baseball cap onto my head and told me, “Bring it back, with one hell of a story.” I traveled throughout India and Nepal with that hat, and I met some incredible people along the way. Several of them signed the hat, it must have contained half a dozen languages by the time I reached Australia. It was a culture shock, landing in Adelaide after so many months in cities like Kathmandu and the wilderness of the Himalaya. I had no plan, I was out of money, and my work history was choppy and unimpressive. To be honest, I felt as though I hadn’t grown enough to justify all the experiences I’d had up to that point. That time in Australia was one of the roughest years of my life, and I was schooled in the art of growing the hell up.
While working in housekeeping and McDonald’s in Broome, West Australia, I met a young man from Japan that I’ll call Kazu. He worked more than sixty hours a week between three jobs and still found time to exercise and prepare healthy bulk meals between shifts and read a book in the evenings. Kazu listened to the same Kanye song every night before bed, an inspiring monologue that would pump him up for the next day’s grind. Kazu also had goals, he was going back to school to learn acupressure and other alternative forms of therapy and medicine. “I’m thinking of starting a food stand in the park nearby,” he told me as young European oil workers stumbled drunkenly from the hostel’s dormitory into the weekly bikini contest at the bar next door. The noise used to drive me mad, Kazu was unfazed. “After my visa expires, I’m checking in to a luxury spa for a week to treat myself.” The man was an absolute unit, I admired him and at times matched his tenacity. Of all my days in Australia, he easily had the most positive lasting effect on my psyche.
The day before I left Broome, I asked Kazu to sign the green hat. Above his signature was the sentence “No matter what, be honest with yourself.”
That was the first rule in his list of ten rules for life. He wrote a manifesto for himself years ago and distilled that into ten easy-to-remember statements. “I’ve memorized them to the point that I don’t need to re-read what I wrote to myself all those years ago, but I keep a copy of the list in my wallet.”
Another one of Kazu’s rules for life was, in a word, “balance”. He spoke about the concept of balance a great deal, whether it be work-life balance, a balanced diet, or a balanced exercise routine. Even though he was working more than sixty hours per week in high-energy restaurants, Kazu compensated all that stress with humility and a plan. “It’s not about becoming a workaholic,” he said to me one evening in the kitchen after preparing his meals for the week. “Everyone has their own limits, and sometimes you have to do more work, in the beginning, to reap the rewards later, but even so, always aim for balance.”
Honesty is the first principle to follow if you wish to find an overall healthy balance in your life, and sometimes being honest means saying “Shit, I’ve dug myself into a hole, and I’ll have to leverage myself out of it. That will take sacrifices.” I think honesty feeds balance, and balance returns more honesty. That’s how routines work, it’s a feedback loop and you have to be careful what you bake into them. If you’re not being honest, you may be completely blind to a weakness in your routine. I’ve written on the method I’m using to grow in honesty and nurture a balanced life here.
The lime green hat became an offering to a shrine outside of a Buddhist temple somewhere in Thailand a year later. I met the original owner in 2018 empty-handed, he was upset but understanding. The story of the green hat required an open ending.
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