Last year, in Taiwan, I met a couple people in the Chinese program who were a good deal older than me … 30, 40-ish. One in particular had had a successful career, but decided in the end his heart wasn’t in it, and quit. He decided instead to study Chinese, although to what end it didn’t seem particularly clear. I think it was mainly to get away.
Reading my first Haruki Murakami book — the author had been highly recommended by my good friend Leslie for some time now — I was struck by something the protagonist Toru Okada says. Okada has quit his job recently, and finds himself with a lot of time on his hands, and with that, a lot of new thoughts:
Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to know another person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
I started thinking seriously about such things a week after I quit my job at the law firm. Never until then — never in the whole course of my life — had I grappled with questions like this. And why not? Probably because my hands had been full just living. I had simply been too busy to think about myself.
Okada’s question about understanding another human being isn’t really my question, but his point stands the same. I’ve taken a break from being too busy to think about myself. And aside from taking pictures of cool and funny things and having loads of fun, and aside from occasionally feeling homesick, I’m glad I’m out here zigzagging off the straight line. It gives me time to think — time for clarity, which sometimes seems like a rare commodity among 25-year-olds, not to mention 40-somethings.
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