This is not an “if I can do it, you can do it too” story. (Part two)

This is a reality check.
Are you living a whole-hearted life?
Do you spend more time like this?

                             Or like this?

When was the last time you sat down alone in a quiet room and asked yourself "what matters most?"

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Human brains love certainty. Our brains are skilled categorization machines, constantly functioning to find patterns, trends, organize information and slot it into structured memories ready for recall to identify new information at the slightest chance. This make humans seek certainty (eg: assurance, poise, firmness, confidence, control) where ever we can find it as if it's a survival need.

If there is one thing I have learned to become CERTAIN of in my life, it is ONLY this: I have no fricking clue about anything, uncertainty is everywhere.

Everything I think I can’t do, I eventually learn that I actually can do it. Everything I think I can do, I eventually learn that I can’t actually do it as well as I thought. Everything I don’t want that I think I am successfully avoiding will chase me around as I try to escape it.  Everything I do want and I’m trying to grab a hold of will just run away from me as I try to reach for it. And everything I think I know can be erased within seconds, proving that I actually know nothing at all.

Life, earth, the universe, me (both outside and inside), is constantly in flux.

Knowing only for certain that nothing is certain at all has given me a great deal of headaches in my life and spilled a great many tears keeping me awake at night. It affects how I interact with people and how I portray myself to the world. Because it’s the juxtaposition between seeking certainty and losing certainty that plagues most human minds (mine included!) and leaves our thoughts in a perpetual state of chaos trying to find answers to the age old  “what do you want to do with your life” kind of questions that haunt us from childhood.

Unfortunately, many people stay stuck on this Ferris wheel ride of seeking certainty and losing certainty throughout their lives. And this happens because they don’t detach themselves from their life experiences to get into that abstract zone where who you are as a human being (your heart), must be teased apart from who you are as a cultural mortal (your head). Put in these anthropological terms, it sounds rather complex. But it doesn’t have to be. Because it’s really just about figuring out the way to make: what you think, what you say, and what you do, all line up.

What it all boils down to is: how you make sense of your own life.

How the heck people with the least familiarity with life (children, teenagers, young adults) are supposed to be able to answer the “predetermined/planned destiny” type questions for their inquisitors on such limited life experience to even begin to make sense of their own lives, baffles me, because it’s been impossible for me to do. But our culture currently thrives on this concept of "the power of youth." And what concerns me the most is, not that we ask these questions so early in life and repeat them often, not at all. But it’s that we expect answers, real answers, sensible answers, to lay the best made plans so early on, which means by the time we grow up and do gain some experience to start making sense of life, we’ve been spinning on our Ferris wheels going up (finding happiness) and down (losing happiness), seeking certainty and losing certainty, for so long that we no longer realize: it’s just a ride. We begin to believe we are just like Ferris wheels spinning out of control; that it’s my fault I can’t make this plan work, or I can’t be who they expect me to be, or who they want me to be, or that really I’m not good enough, or I’m not happy with where this is going, or I’m not fulfilled even though I followed all the rules, or I need more to make it perfect, or it could it happen again and I have to stop it, or that no one understands my “unique” and “individual” ways etc. etc.

Here’s the “catch 22” that I have come to believe in: you are the Ferris wheel itself and the force that powers the ride. And maybe that is the function of life - you are your life experiences and your life experiences are you; you create them, maintain them, ride them, drive them, circle back around and do it over again and again, all for the purpose of getting to the point where you can distinguish between the ride itself and the power supply, to find compassion or peace or happiness or a purpose-driven life or whatever you want to call it…. In other words, the purpose of the ride, and it’s inherent dualism, is to get you into the zone you need to be in, to be able to make sense of your own life and answer those questions “what do I want to do with my life?” and “what matters most?"

So I left my comfortable, cushy, stable life in Canada, as a young adult with a solid plan to fulfill my destiny. Thinking I already knew everything there was to know about everything (as most kids foolishly do), I set forth with a solid foundation to jump off of: people are good and I am strong (so I shouldn’t be scared), be polite, be generous with others, be tolerant of differences (we are all the same inside), follow the rules, be the best I can be, I am smart and know everything already, Canadians are #1.

And was prompty terrified by the sound of my bubble bursting when I hit the ground running.

As Howard Thurman once wrote: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

It’s been a long mostly unpleasant journey thus far, which may seem like a sour statement to make about my life outside of Canada, but as you will see, it is not. It’s actually the most important and sweetest statement I could probably make about what it’s been like to live outside of my established and steady life at home where I belong, because it’s the most real. And it’s the most sincere (humble with a whole lotta context of significance). Because the year I left Canada marks the beginning of the process of me coming alive. And that process was initiated when everything I thought I knew and was comfortable with, was turned upside down and en epic battle of past and future began colliding in my head as I struggled to find better answers to the question "what do I want to do with my life"...

If my first answers that got me started on this exploration were only 1) be Dr. Prime, and 2) I like animals more than people. What comes next?

I made my next list of things to do when I was around 15 years old and modified it again when I was 21…. (to be continued in part 3 "This is not an 'if I can do it, you can do it too' story.)

This is not an “if I can do it, you can do it too” story.

This is a reality check.
Are you living a whole-hearted life?

Do you spend more time like this?

                                Or like this?

When was the last time you sat down alone in a quiet room and asked yourself “what matters most?”

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After spending almost two years living in the jungles of Thailand, I’ve been back in Canada for a short visit at home before shipping myself down south one last time to complete my degree. Approaching the end of nearly a decade of graduate work, and the culmination of a lifetime spent in the education system, this has definitely been a significant and self reflective time for me. I started school when I was 4 years old. I will finish school one year shy of 3 decades later, with only one year “off” between undergraduate and graduate training, that I took to work and do 2 field schools in Central America and volunteer at a chimpanzee research/education facility to gain some experience with non-human primates. (Does that still count as school? It was too fun to be school :) )

I left Canada in 2003, moving to southern Illinois to pursue my lifetime goal of getting a PhD (set when I was somewhere between the ages of 6-10, so that my name would be “Dr. Prime” like my Dad) and working with animals (because I liked them better than people). Those were my only motivating factors when I started this route, and they had (and probably still have) no explanatory basis or rationale whatsoever. They are just the intrinsic inexplicable tenets of my existence; the only two things that come from my heart and not my head. When I made my first ever imaginary list of “what I want to do with my life,” all that was on it was: 1) be Dr. Prime, and 2) I like animals better than people.

You see, the thing about growing up in North America is that, basically from the time you can talk, adults start asking: “what do you want to be when you grow up?” And so we are obliged to come up answers. As you get older this question morphs into “what do you want to do with your life?” “What courses are you going to take to be what you want?” “What are you going to do with that degree?” “Where are you going to work?” “How much money will you make doing that” and so on…. The purpose of this, of course, is so that our young and promising futures can be planned out accordingly and we will become unique and successful individuals who fulfill our destinies.

“Unique” – meaning, not like ANYONE else, on this entire planet of 7+ billion people.
"Successful” – meaning have as many riches as possible.
“Individuals” – meaning separate from others.

But realistically, are people supposed to know, not only their destiny, but the planned course of action of how to fulfill it by the time they become self aware (which happens progressively between the ages of 2-5 yrs old)?

I doubt it.

Ok, maybe that's too young, but by middle school - we definitely know, right?
Or if not then, most certainly by highschool we are certain of who we are and what we want to do forever, right? ... well maybe by undergrad....or...

I’m not knocking the North American system here, many people do find jobs they absolutely love and work hard at to be triumphant (regardless of how successful their personal/emotional life is). The world seems to have a way of making things come together. So if our cultural contribution gets it at least half right with planning, we’re on the right track. And I don’t mean to imply that other cultural systems have it 100% right or wrong either. I can compare and contrast only what I live and what I learn. I was born a human being and I was born into the Canadian North America way of life, so this is what I can comment on to understand life. This is the zone where I have to tease apart who I am as a human being, from who I am as a cultural mortal. These are the two influencing aspects that shape my existence, identity, perspective, and approach to life.

Of course, I am not the first person to write on this subject, if you want a limited and minuscule (but exquisite and comprehensive) fraction of information on the subjects of trying to answer those tricky questions of “what matters most?” or “what do you want to do with your life?” you can pick basically any book on one of my posted reading lists and go from there.

But this blog is not about finding answers or telling you what to do (hence the reminder title of this post). This blog is just about me. And it’s a way for me to work through the ideas in my head, which I share because, as a primate, I am part of a much larger collective beyond my own curiously small head.

And this particular post series is about the unraveling, descrambling, and construction of the currently accurate responses to the questions “what do you want to do with your life?” and “what matters most?”

(see part two con’t - "This is not an 'if I can do it, you can do it too' story")

The Power of One

My plan for coming to Thailand was simple: do my fieldwork and train for more triathlons. I figured with free time after the forest, endless good weather (meaning no Canadian snow), and hills as far as the eye could see, Khao Yai would be the best place for me to learn how to become a better athlete. There’s no place to swim here, but I could run and bike for hours on end. So when I arrived in January 2010, I put on my sneakers and I started to run.

I’m not going to lie, running here sucks. It’s hard. It’s really, really hard. And after 1.5 years, it’s still not getting any easier. “Khao Yai” translates directly from Thai to English into “Big Mountain” and that’s exactly, quite literally, what this place is: a damn, big mountain. Even the “flat land” has hills; they just aren’t as steep as the “real hills”. :) But I made the commitment to myself to run, so I continue to put on my shoes and go.

Not long after I started running was the Best Day Ever when I made my first Thai friend: Jambee.

I couldn’t speak Thai and she couldn’t speak English, but she showed me her running shoes, put them on when I put mine on, and we ran together around the park. I told her I couldn’t speak Thai very well but I wanted Thai friends and so I would learn to speak Thai if people talked to me. She told me she wanted to run before I arrived, but had no friends to run with her and never went. I then told her I would “husband” run with her because I mixed up the Thai words for “always” with “husband.” She shook her head and then told me she would run with me whenever I went.

Before Jambee and I started running in the park no other females exercised around here. In fact, though the kids played soccer together in the parking lot some nights and some of the park rangers got together in the dry season months to play “da-gaw” (think of a cross between volleyball and soccer) pretty much no one else exercised around here, with the exception of three men: Boon Ying, Boon Tah and Chaleam, all three veteran endurance runners who go out every morning for a 10+km run starting at 5:30am.

When Jambee first started running with me she got a lot of “flack” from the other Thais, shouting things like: “Where are you going with the foreigner?! What are you doing with the foreigner?! WHY ARE YOU IN THE CAR WITH THE FOREIGNER?!” ha ha. But she always responded to their exasperated questions by simply saying: “I want to run.”

It took about two weeks of us running together before the shifty eyes of the Thai people directed towards me turned into shy, happy glances and smiles. People would gleefully call out to Jambee on their motorbikes as they drove by and honk their car horns to say hi. It took about 2 months before people started talking to me about running, and that soon became, and continues to be, the hot topic of conversation for any Thai person wanting to talk to me.

I have always been appreciative that everyone noticed and seems to be pleased by my running efforts, though sometimes it felt odd. When Chaleam, my field assistant – not a runner, just another guy named Chaleam – would introduce me to people he would include “She runs everyday” in the standard description: "She’s a researcher. She studies gibbons. She comes from Canada. She can speak Thai now. She runs everyday." Tourists would take “drive by” pictures of me running along the road as they passed in their cars and eventually that turned into people actually stopping me to talk and asking to have their picture taken with me (because seeing foreigners is rare and exciting to them, a picture of me running is NOT glamorous by any means).

When people saw me out and about around the park, and after my Thai improved considerably from practice with Jambee, questions about when I would run, how far I would run, how much I run, why I run and descriptions of where people saw me running were all anyone would ever speak with me about. And after a while I started to wonder why everyone seemed to be so obsessed with my running, until one day Rebecca pointed out: maybe they just want to talk to you and that’s all they can think of to talk about with you; since they see you running it’s common ground. (Good call, Rebecca.) That reality check quickly reminded me to refocus on their smiles and enthusiasm during our conversations and to not be too concerned about the content. :)

After about 5 months of running daily, much to my surprise, it appeared that other people around the park were starting to get the spark to run too. Though Jambee and I were the only two who would consistently run, others were joining us when they could. Two girls that live/work near my house, Ting and Boom, started running with us when they had time in the evenings, and one morning when I was driving into the forest I passed by Poom, the girl who works at the main Visitor Centre convenience store, running along the road near her house. So Jambee and I made plans to occasionally run in the morning with Poom. On the first day with Poom we ran 5km; the usual for Jambee and I, but 3 extra kms for Poom who normally only ran 2km near her house. When I asked if she was Ok and could she handle it? She replied by saying “It doesn’t matter; I have friends to run with so it’s very fun.”

Over the following weeks, three other women (whose names, I unfortunately do not know) started walking our route in the evenings (they wanted to exercise but couldn’t keep up with us running). And another woman began alternating between running with her son occasionally and walking with the other ladies.

When Navigator showed up in November 2010 to do a special feature on the park and after we spent some time together looking for animals, one day after they had stopped filming here they called from Bangkok and to say they wanted to come back to film a lead into the segment on gibbons with me.

"We want to show Thai people that they can come to Khao Yai to exercise here like you do.” They said, “Bring all your friends that run with you and we will meet you for your evening run.”

And so, since Tik (the Navigator) is the “Thai Superstar” who makes all the females swoon in this country, I invited every female in the park I knew – whether they usually ran with me or not, to come running that night. :) The women had already been on my case for weeks about how I was spending time with him and how foolish I was to be photographing the animals in the park instead of him, and how thoughtless it was of me for not inviting him to come eat at the restaurant so they could meet him. So this was the perfect opportunity.

“Don’t worry about running.” I said, “it won’t be much but this is your chance to meet him, so come with me!”

Everyone was very excited, but Thai people are also extremely shy – in the end, only Jambee came with me.

In January 2011, Jambee came in second place in the Khao Yai 3k fun run to celebrate the birthday of the first park chief. It was a great day, she outran nearly everyone in a come from behind feat of determination and people still talk about how my pants fell down while I was racing.

In the following months, my running partners started to dwindle, people were getting busier with more tourists visiting the park and my data collection schedule was less uniform, making my running times more sporadic. But I kept at it as best I could on my own, and people still stopped to talk to me about running all the time. When I would head out with my sneakers on the men around the office would ask: are you going running now, where are you running and how far are you going? But they would always decline, laughing, when I invited them to come with me.

Then one day I was sitting at the restaurant talking with Bahn when I noticed a man running along the street by the campground office.

“Muak runs here almost every day now when he has time,” explained Bahn. Muak is one of the office staff at the Pha Kluai Mai campgrounds where I live. Turns out his son was running too, with a friend in the afternoons near the office to prepare for soccer. And one evening I met Chan – the office manager at Pha Kluai Mai – running along my running route. He told me he had started running 3km everyday in the evenings. Not long after that encounter, Jambee told me our neighbour Baw had started running along the road near our houses where Muak runs in the evenings. So it turns out, the men weren’t running with me, but they had started to run after all.

Tong-Sai, Baw’s younger brother, is another one of my neighbours. He’s really shy and quiet, but always happy and seems genuinely content with life at all times. He doesn’t say much, but asks about running when I stop to talk to him. Once I invited him to come running with me, but he explained: though he wanted to run, he couldn’t because of a heart condition. Jambee explained further but the Thai was pretty complex, so I’m not sure of the details.

Tonight Jambee and Bahn went to the Monday Market, but I said I didn’t want to go because I wanted to run instead. I ran 10km back and forth on the old golf course (my usual running route in the evenings), during my run I met up with three woman walking, and a tourist who comes to bike here often who, incidentally, I found out tonight, has a brother living in Vancouver that owns a Thai restaurant “Siam Thai” and has traveled to Victoria, Vancouver, Lake Louise, Banff, Toronto and Quebec. And as I was finishing off my final lap of 2km, much to my wonder and surprise, I met TONG-SAI jogging lightly along the path. He ran/walked back and forth just once (2.5km). I nearly exploded I was bursting with so much joy to see him trying and doing what he could!
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It’s been about 1 year and 9 months since I moved into the majestic Khao Yai National Park to begin my dissertation research on white-handed gibbons and pig-tailed macaques. As most of you know from following my blog, or chatting with me for more than 5 seconds, it’s been a pretty amazing expedition and I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by wonderful people and given tremendous opportunities while living here.

Running at Khao Yai was a simple commitment that I made to myself before I even got here. I don’t run for other people; I just do it for myself. If no one ever went with me, that’d be Ok. I’d keep trying as best I could. I never expected anyone here to run with me or be interested in it. In fact, prior to coming here, I thought Thai people would think it to be very “unfeminine” and see me as a foolish, brutish foreigner trying to be strong like a man instead of soft like a lady. But since I started running here so many months ago, I have been astounded to see how this small commitment I made to myself grew into something much bigger than me around the park. This has led me to the following conclusion:

If you think what you do doesn’t matter, think again. Even if it’s just something you do for yourself, we are all connected, we are primates – this makes us social creatures, this makes us matter to each other, so we pay attention to each other. And even when you think no one is watching, your seemingly small efforts to improve yourself could be the spark that ignites the fire inside one other person that will lead to numerous others.

All it takes is one person, doing what they can, showing it can be done, and putting in the effort… to influence many.

"Be the change you want to see in the world." - Ghandi

Simple moments of consideration hold the most value.

Next week I’ll be heading to Bangkok to give a talk on my dissertation work at the International Symposium for Biodiversity and Ecology of Wildlife in Thailand at Chulalongkorn University.

I’ll be in Bangkok for three days with the students and professors for the symposium, and then in the following days we will travel around the country to visit some field sites to see long-tailed macaques, stump-tailed macaques, pig-tailed macaques and gibbons.

I’ve been in the house most of this month concentrating on compiling some data to present and putting the presentation together, so I’ve been working late into the night and sleeping in the mornings. My schedule is kinda wonky and I haven’t been spending much time with people around Khao Yai. For the past two nights, I actually had dreams that I was trying to talk to my friends around here, but other people kept interrupting me and causing distractions preventing me from communicating with my friends.

This morning Jambee came over with an iron.

She said, “I haven’t seen you for many days, I miss you.”
“I know, I miss you too, I've been working so much lately." I said.
“When will you go to Bangkok?” She asked.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” I said, “I will be there for 3 days, come back for one day to go into the forest by myself, then the students will come visit.”
Then she said, “You will need to look good for your work, so we must iron your shirts.”

Jambee set up a blanket on the floor and plugged in the iron, while I got three ‘dressy’ shirts. She ironed all three meticulously while humming to herself and occasionally murmuring “three shirts for three days.” She told me to hang them up now and pack them lightly tomorrow so they don’t get creased too much, and asked if I had anything else to iron. I said no, so she went to look at all my clothes to verify.

I thanked her profusely and we set a time to go running together this evening.

This is what I do in my spare time...

JPP: Photography

Just posted a few new pics at: www.facebook.com/jackieprimeproject.
Album title: "Creatures that are not primates at Khao Yai"
This one is my favourite.

Elephant

Newborn Monkey - Ozzy's first offspring.

Look at that face, so precious.

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My First Thai Food

A year and a half ago, I posted a message about my adventures with heating up pork buns (Why Did We Invent Cooking?). That was back when sweet chili sauce was a necessity to fix all Jackie-made foodstuffs and when the answer to the question: What do you eat? Was: lots of cereal and fruit.

In August 2010, I decided to go Primal (no pasta, no bread, no excess sugar, no cereal, no…rice? see Mark’s Daily Apple). Not an easy task when you live in a country that appears to consider rice more important than water.

“I am no longer eating rice.” I declared to my friends at the restaurant after the decision was made. They stared blankly at me then said: “but if you don’t eat rice, you can’t go to the bathroom.” Well that explains why so many people eat rice around here…

I started frying up veggies and eggs at home and to eat in the forest, and continued going to the restaurant for my afternoon meal of Thai food minus the rice with my friends. This lasted for about a month. Turns out, rice is important for digesting Thai food when you eat it everyday. And trying to work up to running 20k continuously without those extra complex carbs and sugar boosters was proving to be really difficult… I really missed my cereal.

It took a few months but eventually I managed to adapt a fairly balanced “as Primal as I could be” nutrition regime that worked with my endurance goals and daily forest excursions, and included occasional small servings of rice with my Thai food.

One night in March, when Kazunari came back to collect more data, as I started making myself dinner he exclaimed: “You are cooking food!” ha ha… by then I was used to it and forgot that once this was a really odd sight. :)

One day I came home from Tesco with green onion, Jambee said “Oh, for Pad Thai?” “Heck no!” I exclaimed, “I can’t make Thai food. These go with potatoes.” She responded, “You are in the restaurant helping them make food everyday! Why can’t you make Thai food yet?” … uh, good question.

Though I help the girls in the restaurant when I have free time and there are many tourists here, I never actually MAKE the food. I fry eggs for them, chop vegetables, peel the plastic wrapper off these weird sausage-like-sweet-hot-dog things that Thai people gobble up in the mornings. I watch them toss this and that and this again into the wok and take mental inventory of all the ingredients in the kitchen. I taste the food when they ask me to test it before they serve it and I stare blankly at them when they say “What else should I add to it?” – I don’t even know what’s already in there!

But then one day Bahn stopped making the Spicy Thai salad that I like so much because she doesn’t think she can make it properly. “It’s not delicious, I won’t make it.”

“It’s so delicious! I want to eat it all the time!” I protested. But she would not make it.

And so the stimulus was set in motion: I’ve been watching them make Thai food for a while now, I know what all the ingredients are, Bahn won’t make the Thai salad and it’s “so easy!” What if I did try making Thai food on my own?

This week I came back from the grocery store with ingredients to make three Thai dishes: pad gra-pow gai, pad prik gang gai, and yam woonsen.

My first Thai dish: 

Pad Gra-pow Gai sai Kai Dow = Stir fried basil chicken with a fried egg

It really tasted like it too!! There was a bit too much soy sauce and sugar did end up all over the kitchen floor, but otherwise an excellent self-made meal. :)

AND the best part about this whole plan was that during the whole production and consumption I came up with a genius idea for a conservation initiative for the Jackie Prime Project; anyone looking to invest in a “Khao Yai comes to Canada” themed restaurant? :)

The moral of today’s story: Try new things, you just may be inspired to create something exceptionally amazing from the whole experience even better than a plate of food.


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Surasack & Ling Chaleam

 

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Just a reminder: when a person is acting, he is not being himself but pretending to be someone else.

I suppose for every sensible enlightening conversation there is also an equally weird and nonsensical conversation waiting to be discussed, because I just had the weirdest conversation with one of my friends here. We were chatting about one of my other friends, who is an actor and appears in Thai soap operas. Soap operas here air in 10-12 week stints several times a year, and he often plays the villainous character in the show.

I said, “He gets nervous around other people, he doesn’t want people to see him and he tries to hide.”

She said, “He’s afraid of people because he knows Thai people don’t like him, they will throw garbage at him and water on him if they see him and curse him.”

“What?” I said emphatically.

She said, “’Cause he’s always so mean on television.”

“People will throw garbage at him because he’s mean on television.” I said flatly.

She said, “He’s no good.”

“That’s not real, you know?!" I exasperated, "He’s acting.”

She thought about it for a second then said, “Meh, Thai people don’t know the difference.”

I exclaimed laughing, “That’s not real! Do you think I like an evil person?!”

She smiled coyly.

“He’s a good person!” I exclaimed.

She started laughing as I shook my head chuckling in disbelief and then we changed the subject.

Oh my goodness that was so silly :)


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