Cherry Blossom

I stumbled through the first few Japanese lessons on Duolingo with underwhelming success. I knew there were a lot of characters in its ancient alphabet but didn't quite appreciate just how many. This was a far cry from the Hangul crash course I got in Busan, Korea 11 years ago. With a few key phrases memorized, by the time the trip was over, I was at least able to apologize and order a black coffee in the native tongue, paired of course with the requisite pointing and hand waving to indicate I would be consuming the beverage either on or off the premises. 

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About two months ago I was afforded the opportunity to take part in an oversees Army mission. I was told it would be about three weeks, that it would be in Japan, and that I would receive more details later. The rest was up to the powers that be to determine. I think one of the reasons people leave the military is being part of an organization that doesn't always consider how plans made at the top of the hierarchy trickle down to the lowest levels, and how operations planning and implementation is done on monolithic scales, deaf to the complaints (whether legitimate or not) of those who voluntarily grafted themselves into the enterprise. Whatever the reason, it doesn't have to be an altogether demoralizing practice to subject oneself to the whims of a higher entity, unsure of how things are going to play out, relying instead on faith in the process to carry you along. Learning to subvert the drive for control with the drive for exploration is the trick. It's a fact of life in any event that we take part of is always nested in a framework wherein we only have a small piece of control and influence over exteriors. It just becomes far more apparent when one puts on a uniform. 

The trip to the Land of the Rising sun began from Ft. Lewis, WA and proceeded up to Fairbanks where we picked up another contingent of Soldiers who would be joining us on this bilateral exercise with the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces. The Army has such a strange way of both bringing me back to places I thought I'd never see again while bringing me to places I never would have imagined I'd see to begin with. After a nostalgic glimpse at a northern lights display outside the triple-7's tiny window, above my old, crystal-glazed home in the far north, the plane steered westward and after 23 long hours from the very start of the trip, we finally set foot on Kyushu Island. 

My father did not frequently make much conversation of his occupation as an electrical engineer in the telecommunications business. The longer I'm in my own professional career, the more I begin to understand why; there are many aspects to adult work that are simply boring, at least in their description if not in their execution. Thus, I don't have much to recapitulate here in terms of the specifics of Army work. Not so much because it was boring per se, but that attempts to elucidate the endeavor here in a compelling manner would distract from the main point. 

One remark I will make is that in my mind, the most profound and impactful work to be done there was getting face time with the Japanese. We had a "higher level" mission wherein we played out a wartime scenario and operated as if our ground forces were working alongside theirs, and while the wargaming and strategizing are all fine and well and necessary, I see them as ancillary to the "mere" conversations that our lower enlisted personnel were having with theirs on long, otherwise tedious guard duties. 

Wars will pass away but the bond made through shared suffering is something indelible. Every Solider knows this, whether consciously or not.  

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The Behaviorists, a school of psychology which interests itself on the influence of reward, punishment, and environmental queues on human behavior, would harvest a substantial amount of evidence for the validity of their theory by examining my own behaviors upon arriving on foreign soil. While I often teach about the importance of setting up one's home environment, for example, to facilitate change one wants to see in their life, I got a first hand look—for not the first time, but the first time at least with my mind thinking in these terms—at just how profound an effect this has. Which is to say, just about all the cause of worry and neuroticism I contend with at home simply vanished in my three weeks away. I have an idea of why.

We are novelty seeking machines. At home, it's easy to feed the beast with scrolling and the latest TV series, but I find that such things leave one altogether malnourished. Curiosity is a hunger signal from the mind and when it is fed the trash of 2-3 second video clips, its appetite, rather that being put to rest, is in fact stirred up; substitutes can't satisfy. And what I was left with after my time exploring Kumamoto was a deep satisfaction that that hunger was very well nourished. It's when our curiosity drive is fed the wrong things that we worry so deeply. Like food without vitamins is exploration without legitimate horizons. 

That's my theory anyway. How much worry could be tempered if we were simply curious about the right things?

Japan, for this westerner, was a smorgasbord of substantive exploration. I think that lies at the heart of why I've always enjoyed foreign travel so thoroughly. It is impossible for me to be terribly worried about anything because there are so many novel things to attend to in the moment. Even a walk into the local 7-eleven provides a feast for the eyes to behold as almost everything is different looking. 

For a good three days after the formal portion of the Army exercise, we were able to go out and explore the area. The meals were cheap and delicious, the sushi ruined me for the average fair back home, and the size and shapes and makes and models of all the cars never ceased to be a source of wonder.

What is perhaps the most fun about exploring Asia, in the limited amount of experience I have at the venture, is making attempts to compare the strange thing you're experiencing here to something you're already familiar with back home. While one process in the mind is seeking newness, another seeks familiarity. Once in a while, if you're lucky, you'll experience something so new as to break any previous category you had and compel you to develop a new one, arming you with the best prize of all: new language.  

My world has been pretty globalized at this point in my life—even mochi has become commonplace at the Bend Whole Foods—and I can't say I had any serious revelatory experiences like I did when I last visited Southeast Asia 1/3rd of a life ago (I tried horse meat for the first time at least. Not great.), but I can say that exposure to this environment has done the trick of updating a way of thinking for me. That way of thinking says that the cravings I have back home, for food, for novelty, for app scrolling, for anything that my body tells me I must have to survive, must be met in a particular way. In fact, they do not, as this time here has exposed. 

One reason why I enjoy studying foreign languages is so that I can put my mind in a different frame of reference for the order of meaning of things. The words we use are mediators between the foreign and the familiar, and it seems to me there's no absolute way of doing this process. It behoves one to practice wiring different neurons together to form thoughts from another arrangement of words. French often tags the adjective after the noun. Japanese has no articles. Norwegian has half the conjugation of verbs as English and a quarter that of French. Yet we all manage to communicate. It is a wonderful analogue to how we communicate to our own selves, what and how it is we describe the exterior world to our interior one. Language is that filter which translates raw sensory data into meaning for us. We can get lost even in our own translations if we don't have an internal dictionary comprehensive enough to account for novel experiences. That's why sating our curiosity is so important; translating the infinitude of being into usable, meaningful bits of information is what we're here for. 

What makes the whole process such an adventure is that there are always new ways in which to do this, to update our internal vocabulary, and in doing so, we get to enjoy the fruits of sacrificing the familiar. Fruits like kobe beef on a table grill, melt in your mouth raw tuna delivered on a miniature bullet train, and not-so-furtive glances by a pair of cute Japanese girls at a Starbucks who had a terribly hard time hiding their giggles upon seeing this strange interloper at their local spot. 

When we satisfy our curiosity, it also feeds the machine responsible for generating ideas. And one such idea presented itself on my second to last day in country: Google search: CrossFit gym. 

One word I still need to add to my own dictionary is one which describes something that is both entirely familiar, while being entirely foreign, and one of the most fun things I've ever done. My presence there had quite an effect, eliciting a round of applause when the coach, who was mostly bilingual, introduced me. Between the coach's Japanese instructions for the workout, I could hear the universal CrossFit terms like "deadlift," "step-ups," and "farmer's carry," and had no problem following along. Aside from those, we of course spoke the common language of doing difficult things with our bodies. We're used to drop-ins of all shapes, sizes, and nationalities back home, but this highly homogenized group was apparently enjoying the novelty my presence produced as much as I theirs. 

Updating one's language is a mutually upward spiral.