The Undiscovered Country in Things That I'm Grateful For

To say that I’m still shaken by the events that unfolded in the last entry would be accurate. I’m very sensitive to death, especially random death. The full story about those young men emerged fully as friends and family have left flowers and photographs at the tree of the young man that died… apparently, I had my facts wrong and he never made it to the hospital. I didn’t realize that the van I saw was actually the coroner and not an ambulance.

The young man’s body laid on the sidewalk, wrapped in a yellow tarp for nearly four hours before the coroner arrived.

I was reading an entry which ends like this:
“is the real figure
encased in the cocoon’s brittled layer
covered and shrouded
remain undiscovered
in peace, forever.”

In Hamlet, Shakespeare refers to death as The Undiscovered Country. It is a journey we must all take and yet never know how it goes.

Now, in pop culture, there is a movie called Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country which was the first Star Trek film I ever saw almost 30 years ago in the theater. That film, which quotes a lot of Shakespeare, actually twists the meaning of The Undiscovered Country to mean something else; not death, but rather the future.

My friends and family have often called me morbid because whenever I go somewhere with any kind of permanence, whether it was Los Angeles or Paris, I always threw a big party and hugged everyone tightly. When they asked me why I was like that, I simply replied, “Well because I could die on this trip.”

I’ve always been more aware of death than almost anyone in my life. But I’ve been more wary of the future. With certainty, I know that my death lies out there somewhere, and sometimes that has made me rather idle with my goals. Why be in a rush to die?

But the death of my grandmother kind of reset the way I looked at death. It made me realize that waiting for death is not a way to live. The future remains undiscovered because I am unwilling to explore. My discontent was keeping me locked in a cycle of fear and self-pity that I simply couldn’t abide any longer so I started making plans to leave like I always wanted.

I found a meme that had Joan Crawford’s face that simply said, “When life shuts a door, open it again. It’s a door. That’s how they work.”

I felt a kind of defeat after being denied my return to Paris the year before my grandmother died, and someone looked at me and said, “Well, I guess it’s not the right time,” followed by another person who said, “Everything happens for a reason.”

That irked me for years and I didn’t know why until I finally postulated something:

I don’t believe in “the right time”; I believe in progress. I also don’t believe “everything happens for a reason”; I believe in process. Stop taking fate out of your own hands and make progress. When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, don’t Deus ex Machina it by saying everything happens for a reason… Figure out why it stalled and learn the process. Incremental progress is still progress.

Thus I began to find a way to leave. Everyone kept saying to find a job and save… well, fine, but I always end up getting stuck in a cycle of loyalty to a job that really doesn’t have any of my interests or goals as a priority. It would keep me looped, and my depression would have me drinking endlessly to fill the depression.

And if I were to leave, what would I do once I got there? I don’t really have a skill that makes me an outstanding person to hire… but once I spoke to my co-worker Christophe, who had just moved to California from France, he was telling me about all the opportunities that awaited me in France because I spoke English, had a degree in French, and even had experience living there.

Time to make a plan and open that door.

So that’s when I decided to get my teaching certificate. It would allow me to work anywhere in the world. It would make my life portable in a way that it never had been. I could explore that undiscovered country once more.

At some point, I decided to change my trajectory a bit. I’ve been to France, it’ll still be there once I’m ready to go back. I want to go somewhere I never once in a million years thought I would ever go. So that’s how I zeroed in on Thailand. I started absorbing their media, learning bits about their culture, their history. This is part of my process.

I started this journey seriously in August of 2019 and I’m finally here. I’ve been teaching for over a year online now (and I’m not the best at teaching online, I’m much better in person). And part of me has this fear, a kind of imposter syndrome, that I won’t actually be good enough to get a job there and achieve my goals. But my first teaching job was when I was 21 years old, and one of my students has grown up, graduated college, and still writes me to tell me how much I helped shape his future.

I can do this.

I had even forgotten my nagging awareness of death until that car slammed into that tree.

The undiscovered country is the future. The undiscovered country is death. Somewhere out there in that tapestry. Different choices will bring it to me at any given moment. But the undiscovered country is also life. There are things out there that I never believed possible, and if I worry about the other two undiscovered countries I will never be able to explore all the possibilities that exist before me.

Now this whole trip could blow up in my face and I could end up back in California in September. But I won’t be coming back to the same life I left. I’m certain of that.