The Engagement of Opportunity

In a world of hues
olive, tangerine, crimson
paint this explorer.
(11.27.16)

It’s impossible to trace the true origin of any opportunity. One could argue that my path began when I was a toddler with my mother, siblings, and the red Radio Flyer wagon, picking up fast-food wrappers and beer bottles along the streets of my hometown, but this is not my autobiography. Fast-forward twenty-some-odd years: I am working as the program director of a grassroots youth environmental volunteer program at Avalon Park and Preserve and received a networking email in February 2015 from the Montessori Model United Nations program. They had come across my work and, rightly so, believed that my program’s mission closely parallels their own: cultivating stewards. As a result, I was more than willing to attend their International Youth Earth Summit in November of that year to serve as a mentor, and thereafter, I rekindled my long-lost love for model United Nations by training to serve as a bureau member at their inspiring youth-centric conferences. My introduction to MMUN and the iYES conference was the beginning of a great personal reinvigoration, the necessity of which first caught me off-guard on the train into Manhattan as I began to feel nervous about my preparedness for the first time in years. It’s my belief that growth cannot occur while one feels truly comfortable– rather, personal growth is a reward after times of unease and self-examination– and recalling this long forgotten sentiment, I took a deep breath and kept my outward composure as I walked into the Hilton Midtown. Enter, Bremley: interminable energy and ambition packaged in a navy pin-stripe suit.

Bremley serves on the advisory board of Montessori Model United Nations, quite appropriately considering his impressive resume of international degrees and vocations. My impression from that day, which I can wholeheartedly confirm after 17 straight days traveling alongside this man, was that Bremley’s entire being revolves around the betterment of this planet. We coincidentally sat next to each other for an hour or so that afternoon during the iYES conference, my having managed to swallow most of my professional insecurities that day and in doing so, authentically and confidently interacted with many of my newfound peers. He zealously spoke of his mangrove project in Myanmar, amongst other irons he had in the fire, and I vigorously nodded along, never having met anyone with such resolute passion for the earth, and never feeling more obliged to hide my ignorance and inability to place a country on a mental map. (I filled that evening with a series of readings about Myanmar, its recent shift in political regime, and mangroves around the world, concluding with a detailed tour of a global atlas.) Bremley sent an email the following July, surely to countless individuals within his vast web of contacts, updating us on his work across the globe, and inviting anyone to join him when he returned to his homeland in the late autumn to work on some of the charitable projects he was involved in there. Feeling a need to refuel and refresh my own aspirations after six fruitful years establishing and running my program, and recalling the vigor of the man in the pin-stripe suit as he spoke and struck chords that echoed my own environmental and social passions, I signed on as a Worldview Impact Explorer. I would not be given many more details about the trip, nor meet or have any lengthy conversation with Bremley for the second time until I stepped off the small airplane in Guwahati, Meghalaya, India.

 

Despite this bold display of confidence in my own intuition, I experienced a mounting nervousness leading up to my departure in late-November. It’s problematic to petition family, friends, and colleagues to subscribe to your clairvoyance, and difficult to have a better-than-awkward conversation about such a considerable trip when you yourself have so few details about the excursion; I quickly came to feel irresponsible, impulsive, and ignorant for signing up for this with little-to-no proof of a promising experience. In truth, all I knew was that I was going to India to do some nonprofit-based work with a small group of people led by this loose connection I’d made the year before. I had once been sent an itinerary, but the dates of travel shifted a few times, and when I didn’t receive a refreshed document upon my third request, it became obvious that the original itinerary was more of a concept plan, we would be taking the trip day-by-day, and my typical preference for structured plans should be left at home. The only personal goal that I didn’t feel fearful in setting was the hope to refine my understanding of how small-scale efforts, like those of my volunteers’, plug into the global environmental movement. I hoped it possible to absorb this concept and vocabulary by working alongside people who have experience both hyper-locally and internationally. I calculated again how costly this venture was going to be and tried to mask my concerns with an outward display of anticipation and bravado.

Friends and colleagues who have previously traveled to India shared brief excitement about my journey, swiftly followed by a lengthy list of medications to bring, types of people and places to avoid, and certain customs to be sure to heed, always concluding with a defeated frown while avoiding eye contact, muttering something about digestive problems. But it wasn’t so much these conversations that made me uneasy as the glaring unknown of what it was that I would experience in my two-and-a-half weeks away from work and home. I am fortunate enough to claim time as my most precious commodity– though perhaps it’s everyone’s, ultimately– and the concept of returning without having accomplished what I was going there to do would have been crippling, except that I wasn’t sure precisely what I was going for in the first place, so this anxiety tackled me before any others could. Traveling inevitably provides one with refreshing insights and knowledge, but my ambitions were greater for this trip: I would not be satisfied returning only with stories of leisurely excursions, striking landscapes, and cultural curiosities. Lightly loading up my green backpacker’s bag, I was vaguely prepared for all of the activities that I could imagine partaking in during this trip– not having much of an itinerary– and left clutching to the positive conviction offered by an exceptional few loved ones, with my having ultimately struggled to keep hold of much confidence in my own intuition.

I thrust my naked
hands deep into foreign lands
to learn new rhythms.
(11.28.16)

Flying over metropolitan New Delhi, I found myself relieved to finally be beginning the excursion, and then quickly flushed with the same quiet ignorance I felt when meeting Bremley for the first time. In the dark, I could see long lines of cars transecting a vast urban landscape littered with lights, and descending further, industrial parks and mega-mall signage came clearly into view. After 20 hours of travel, I blearily doubted that this could be an Indian city; in the dark, it looked as if it could be Atlanta, Georgia. What did I really have to base my expectations on: Slumdog Millionaire; glimpses of Bollywood films; exotic advertisements? I audibly laughed at myself for subconsciously anticipating an enormous city without much modern infrastructure, and I made a mental note to keep close at hand my ability laugh at myself.

Thinking back, I allowed for very few conscious expectations before departure: the upkeep of my daily haiku journal; the need to deliberately maintain an open mind upon entering each experience; and the inevitability of physical discomfort at some point. As is always the case concerning expectations, some were realized, while others were wholly miscalculated. With little exception, I was inundated with inspiration and journaled contentedly every day. More importantly, what I had previously perceived as my own ‘open’ mind was actually only ‘ajar’ and it is a far more enlightened version of open-mindedness and aptitude of fair perception that I am predominantly grateful for as a result of this journey. This personal growth came as a result of my 17 chaotic, invigorating, dynamic, puzzling, fantastical days in northeast India.

Crafted schemes can’t match
the pure complexities of
organic chaos.
(12.2.16)

The actual content of the trip was nowhere near to what the original itinerary had advertised. If I had held onto a need for it to be what I had signed up for– an excursion that lightly sprinkled volunteer work into adventure tourism– I would currently be very disappointed. What happened instead was far more grand and enriching. As the sun rose and set each day, our small group bounced between extremes of Meghalaya’s socioeconomic scope. On average, there were four meetings per day– often in small rural villages– with local youth groups, schoolteachers, entrepreneurs, established professionals, academics, or political figures, aiming to learn about their local customs, socioeconomic desires, environmental concerns, education systems, and whatever else happened to come up in conversation. When the sun retired around 5:30, the temperature dropped from 70 degrees to 40, and we would find ourselves back in the city as guests at some brilliant dinner, often turned party, affording another perspective in these same conversations– along with a damn good time.

Reflecting on the ebb and flow of faith in my intuition to embark upon this ultimately fruitful journey, I will not stake claims to a self-fulfilling prophecy with my carefully managed perspective, nor give all of the credit to fate and the people or events that filled each day, as the result of my experience was surely a combination of what was in my own hands and what I came to regard affectionately as the “the chaos.” I’ve concluded that we make more decisions each day than we care to fathom.