guest blogger: Kelly Burner

There is something I have been meaning to do for some time. I've been wanting other people on this adventure to share their thoughts here. I finally did an adequate amount of convincing! The following blog is written by my ball and chain, Kelly. If you don't know him, he's a genius. More of his excellently articulated observations can be found here: http://doctorkneel.blogspot.com 

My usual banal updates are posted below this one. Enjoy!

“Welcome to the jungle.”

After eagerly awaiting every new entry on this blog for two months as I worked my soul-killing white-collar job in the stoic thousandfold recirculated airs of an office in Irvine, the gap between present and past has collapsed and erupted. Last Sunday October 10^th, I finally arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica. What is it like, to leave one life and begin another? What is that time like, between endings and beginnings, where all has yet to be decided, and the sheer multiplicity of the possible is beheld in and as itself?

If you haven't caught on yet, this is not Jessica writing. I am her boyfriend, whom she has mentioned a few times in these entries.

What is the truth of a reality – except the intersection of the multiplicity of perspectives that mutually experience it? Although I am by no means as talented, articulate, or as mellifluous a writer as Jessica, I thought to put my pen to paper – my fingers to keys – and give you, her small yet devoted readership, a different angle on her reality.

It has been six days since I arrived here, and before then I had never traveled abroad. My first 23 years were lived, with minor exception, within the confines of Orange County, California. What is it like, to be so suddenly torn from one's accustomed patterns of life, to dive into something new and entirely alien? There is something in all of us that recoils from such a radical shift. Even those who love novelties do so only within a framework of familiarity. Some may kayak, some may free-climb mountains, some may run marathons – but for how long do these novelties distance them from their customary reality? Of course, this is not to say that these momentary difficulties are not difficult, but only that they are fleeting. It is the difference between doing something exceptional once, and making the exception itself one's way of life.

Just as we are all repulsed, and pull back revolted from the notion of change, so too do we feel ourselves drawn in by it. That which is feared is also desired. In everyone with whom I had an association before I left Orange County, I sensed both attraction and revulsion over the idea of living on a remote farm in the Costa Rican rainforest for three months. Some would ostensibly express their attraction while a certain revulsion lay dormant; others would demonstrate their revulsion with panicked words and lingering pleading glances, while still yet hiding a secret yearning.

On a highly abstract level, I am interested to know wherein this tangle of fear and desire finds its origin and drive. Why do we fear it – so much? Why do we long for it – so much? In our daily lives, we are accustomed to having everyday desires and fears. Is that car going to hit me? Will she give me her number? Will I get that perfect job offer? When will I ever graduate? We are assaulted by possibilities at every moment, but nothing we ordinarily want or fear has the same immensity as the unanswered hyperquestion:

Costa Rica.

Hardly even a phrase and yet still a question, it thuds against your chest when you dare to think it possible. Questions aren't supposed to fall, hard. They are supposed to lilt and lift themselves upward, easing you into response, never breaking the smooth social rhythm of stimulus-response-stimulus for long enough to give yourself what you used to always want: a real choice.

I write all of this, perhaps unnecessarily, but perhaps also to tell you simply this. The thing you want most, whatever it is, is closer than you would ever dare to dream.

The distance between you and yourself is infinitesimal, and only appears large due to doubt. Doubt is many things to many people. We find in it a comfort, a method, a safeguard, even also a foe. But despite all this relativity, there is certainty to be found. The constitution and makeup of reality consists largely in our participation within it. In interacting with reality, we create reality.

There is such a thing as choice, and all choices are made. We don't want it to be so easy as that. A choice is what you make when you're at the grocery store, wondering whether to buy name-brand or store-brand. It may make a difference, but it will never make much of one. Choices are mundane, frivolous, conditional. How could something so flighty be made to determine a life? Too much of choice is left to chance for us to feel confident in leaving our fates to it. Our despairing souls cry out imploringly: “Doesn't it all mean more than that?”

Perhaps there is a fate or a destiny. If there is, I know yet nothing of it.

But I can say this: I am here. Things have changed, and radically. And it was simpler than I ever hoped to think.

Today is Friday, and much has passed since I arrived. It's amazing how much can happen while time still lingers, trickling like sap, stretching out like syrup. Things are slower here. It can be a blessing; it can be a curse. But, as I remind myself often and in frequently surprising contexts, simply because something is different does not make it worse. Difference is simply and only difference. I think that we are all prone to react against the unfamiliar. Perhaps it is an evolved instinct, because what you don't know really could kill you. But instinct is not the highest realization of wisdom. We are capable of more.

I know that Jessica has attempted to make this blog as little philosophical as possible. Maybe I am retreating into the world of the abstract in order to protect myself from the frightening reality of the present. Or maybe all of this is just as much a product of this experience as a catalog detailing daily events and observations would be.

The sounds of the jungle are both pleasing and grating. The heavy pitter-patter of the rain rumbling against the rooftop is very soothing – that is, until you have to go out in it. And the chatter of the chickens is absurdly disruptive as you're listening to the nocturnes of Chopin – that is, until you get a craving for scrambled eggs. It's like that with many things, here and anywhere else. In all good things, there is some bad; in all bad things, some good. Keeping clearly aware of this strange dynamic of opposition brings one to learn, bit by bit and steadily, to withhold from the instinct and habit of valuation. The rooster is crowing – must it already be good or bad? Why can't it simply be?

In civilization, things are so easy that our survival instinct withers and becomes an uncanny distortion of itself. With all our comforts assured, a quiet anxiety creeps into everything, and nothing is plain enough that it could not pose a threat. Everything we experience demands a valuating reaction. There is a new employee on my floor. Quick, how do I feel about it? There is a crack in my windshield. Quick, how can I mend it?

All this urgency, all this high tension. Why do we do it? Why do we torture ourselves with so many minutiae? With our lives and comforts assured, the survival instinct loses its raison d'etre, and must fight for its own survival. Suddenly, everything becomes a matter of life and death. We will say, “Yes, I know that either way it will be fine, but nevertheless I worry”. How little we realize our own fortune! How remarkable it is, that habit can so unequivocally level all of the most extraordinary things, reducing every favor to an obligation, and every privilege to a right.

What is the answer? A man has to get away from himself. And how does one do that? Each of us will answer differently, and so I will keep the question open, as a challenge, as an opportunity. Because we all need to rebel – we all need to be someone else, if even for just a time. Who will you be to find out who you are? What will you risk in hopes to gain anew? And when is the right time – except now?