Trek End Game

This Thai blog actually STARTS on Dec. 20, 2008; to get to the REAL start, look to the right margin of this page and click on Dec. 2008. That will get you to Dec. 20 and a full explanation of why and how we went to Thailand. Then you'll see to full story.


For all of you awaiting the next venture in my Chiangmaitrek, there's only one way to say this: I've prematurely returned to the cozy confines of Bowling Green, my wife, my family, and my friends. While not all of my goals were reached, many were and I will remember Thailand fondly.

Why an early return home? Because I realized that I am not wired for an extended stay in Chiang Mai. I take full responsibility for the struggles I created for myself...struggles that soon became overbearing.


It took two weeks without Dianne to support me to realize that I could not manage the taxing demands of transportation (I had no car or scooter), food, heat and living alone. I weighed those taxing conditions against tackling my too lofty goals and realized that I had reached my limits. Rarely have I disappointed myself and others who were depending on me; at Payap and in Chiang Mai, I needed to retreat. Sometimes one must put one's own mental and emotional health first. I did that and now sit at my MacBook looking at a frozen pond and gray skies of the American midwest winter. My life is ahead of me again, and I return to Stephen Daedalus to say that I will reach out to discover what the future holds.

I've included in picture form the five angels who made my life in Chiang Mai good: Tong, my "driver," Dr. Pearl, my department supervisor, Daeng, our condo manager, Jum, a waitress from Sakura Japanese restraurant that Dianne and I identified as our source of sustenance, and Supattra, my bgsu graduate student now working in the US Consulate in Chiang Mai. These five individuals represent my Thai friends who gave so much to me; I could add ten or more others who provided a welcoming home away from home. I salute my new friends and thank them for all I was given.

POSTSCRIPT
It's a month after after my return from Chiang Mai and I've been settling into the familiar confines of home, family, friendship and routine. My psychological state has returned to something feeling very much like normalcy, even as I still ponder how I could have been driven to leave something I had worked so hard to attain. After all, I still see Thailand as a place calling for the likes of me to come and give of myself.
Certainly, the forces that drove me home were many, but one that stands out is described by Atul Gawande in a recent New Yorker article, "Hellhole: Is Solitary Confinement Torture?" Thailand was in no way hell and Chiang Mai in no way torture but I resonated with the piece which starts with Harry Harlow's monkey experiments and ends with the psychoses suffered by prisoners dealt solitary confinement.

The picture is of my office in the MA-TESOL Department.
"Everyone's identity is socially created: it's through your relationships that you understand yourself...." Gawande makes a strong case for ending a "soul-destroying loneliness" that hostages and prisoners held in solitary confinement experience. My own friends here in the US have recounted their own loneliness in the early months of military service, or the expected homesickness with almost any kind of extended travel. One conclusion is that the ties that bind us to sanity are many and invisible, and most of them are tied to our homes, our family, friends and our past. When those ties are rent asunder, even when other and new loving linkages are provided to fill in the void, there can be a terrible emptiness, one that is filled only by the likes of a Greg Mortensen.