Test for Echo

I’ve been trying a lot of things over here in J-Pan, and getting into a lot of things I had absolutely no interest in before: things like biking and snowboarding and mountain climbing. These days I regularly get completely naked in front of good friends and complete strangers, sitting around in a tub with them and not giving it a second thought. That’s not the end of it, either. These initial forays have got me mulling over things like surfing and skydiving and white water rafting. It’s getting to the point where pretty much every time Mark asks me about trying something crazy, my default answer is “yeah! We should do that!”, and the truly crazy thing is I actually mean it.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that's driving me to try these new things in Hokkaido: to try to pick up these new hobbies or sports. Me, the guy who hadn't seriously ridden a bike in over ten years goes out and commits to a $700 road bike at the chilly end of October. And, before the snow flies, I ride that bike like the devil: deep into the Furubira valley and up the mountain towards Kamoenai. As evening temperatures dip, I'm layering long johns and tshirts and sweaters so that I can strike out at night, riding up the dark valley with only the full moon and my meager handle bar light to guide me. And it's cold and it's exhausting and it's beautiful.

In January, as the snow was piling up, I finally followed up on my promise to myself to pick up snowboarding here in Hokkaido. With skiing as my only experience to go on, I asked Mark to book us in for three days on the hills of Niseko. I resigned myself to take lessons and learn from Mark and not leave that mountain until I could ride a board. It kicked the crap out of my body (so much so that I bowed out on the third day and returned my gear—so much so that I wound up having to take my first sick day at work to recover from the aches and the pains and the chills of two solid days of falling on my ass), but I loved it, and there were moments when I would shift smoothly from backside to frontside—heelside to toeside—in an action mere fractions from a loss of control, and in those moments I felt agency; and I felt unity with the mountain and the scene spreading out below in a way I don't think I'd ever done on skis. With two days on the board I already loved it more than I had my many years on two planks.

And now, in a fit of adventurous madness that is becoming all-to-familiar over here in Japan, I am buying snowboard jackets and boots and old boards with old bindings. I'm throwing myself into it with the same hope and hair's breadth of control that I throw myself into my turns.

But what is it?

The adventurous madness?

Where does it come from? Why does it grip me here? What feeds it?

The unimaginative might brand it a "quarter life crisis," but I would tell you that attaching such a cliché to it curtails your ability to better understand it—to learn more from it. To give it that overused name is to avow to understand it, through and through, and I don't believe that we do.

I think these so-called X-life crises are cries for creation, or re-creation. They come from the realization, whether overt or subconscious, that your life has begun to go on without you. The crises are cries for Agency, as we notice that our day-to-day has shifted to auto-pilot: that all of those smart life choices we've made over the years have formed up as soundly as we'd hoped into this vast supporting structure in our lives that would just keep on running if we just sat back and followed along its predetermined path. The structure isn't a prison or a gallows or an oppressive regime. Whether we admit it or not, we choose this auto-pilot course as we build it up one good decision at a time.

However the realization of this structure in our lives, and the way that its self-sustaining processes almost make our decisions for us, can be shocking. It's from this shock that the crises come.

As individuals find themselves tangled up in such an automated framework, they crave to wrestle back control. They feel they must regain Agency in their lives. In the clichéd examples, they take this Agency by buying sports cars or motorcycles: they regain a sense of control by making decisions uncharacteristic of them—decisions that the automatic structures they've developed could never precipitate.

Unfortunately, it would seem that our society only really perceives the material in these matters: we see the sports cars and the motorcycles, but we only scratch the surface of the true motivations behind them. We label the whole situation an X-Life Crisis, and in so doing we pretend to have a firm grasp of the event. In labeling it, we profess to understand it, and we forget it in our drawer of loose-ends-securely-tied.

So, in the snowboards and the bikes of my adventures here in Japan, you might tell me I've had myself a little quarter-life crisis. You might tell me that this is a phase: that this, too, shall pass.

But, me, I'd tell you that you’re wrong: that what I'd experienced here is a phenomenal opportunity.

In Canada before I came, as well as during my first months in Japan, I would wish on stars for something meaningful to come of Japan: for something to take home from here, whether it be a Love or a Revelation.

Now I wonder if I've already received what I'd hoped for, and I'm thinking it's the fertile gift of rebirth.

Highfaluting, grandiose, and sweeping, yes, but, to ground it a bit, I find myself in an alien country with only the meagerest of responsibilities tying me to home, and I have been given world enough and time to recreate myself in any way I so choose. I have been given license to do whatever it is I feel, for there is no one here who has known me long enough to tell me such a course would be uncharacteristic of me.

Most important of all, I think I’ve managed to free myself from a control more oppressive than peer pressure or group consensus. I’ve managed to break down part of my own expectations for myself: my own internal concept of what is and isn’t characteristic of me.

And so has Japanimated Jones been born into the flesh of what once was me. He eats less and writes more. He's training to be a samurai with ceremonial armour and shinais. In the summer, he rides bikes, and in the winter, he rides boards. On weekday evenings he convenes with the stars and the moon in an utterly silent town, and on the weekends he sets off on wild adventures with his fellow foreigners. He's growing hobbies where before he only had interests. The change isn't perfect and all-consuming. There are still the pitfalls of procrastination and good intention, but we're working on that.

It’s lead me to think that transformations like this are made easier by geographic distance from the who and what you used to be. I have a friend who lost her job in Toronto, and took the whole thing as an opportunity to relocate out west. At that distance from home and what she was, she found the possibility to create a new is for herself. Now when I visit her, I sometimes don’t recognize her new present when I compare it to the past I remember. She’s got all the care and the love she ever did, but she’s existing in new places now, with new interests and new opportunities, and she seems to glow as a result of them.

These shifts in perspective, inspired by shifts in setting, cast our lives in new light. What is important remains, while what is superfluous falls away. And in that falling away, we are treated to openings for the new and the different: time to pursue the things you said you always wanted to but never did.

And I recognize that not everyone can just up and relocate for a bit for that necessary shift in perspective. I’m just saying that I’ve seen first hand what such a shift can do, and, in the end, I feel like I have been given a gift in the shift, along with the money and the time to seize the opportunities that precipitate from it.

Finally, because this last realization precipitated from all of this, but I couldn’t find a clever place to slot it in, I’ll leave it as the final word on this rambling tangent:

In Canada, I used to think myself a rather lucky person.

In Japan, I have fully realized that I live a charmed life.

Thanks to all of you who make it so.