Just the Way Things Are

Walking down the plane's stairwell to the tarmac the smells of the city hit me hard in the nose. Burning coal, rain evaporating off concrete, and fruit rotting in wicker baskets mingle together easily in the intense heat and humidity.

To my right the massive hills that are the gateway to the Himalaya are lush and green and dotted with tiny villages, each made up of small white-washed buildings surrounding a single temple which is topped off with a saffron color, ornamental roof. 

Thank goodness Ngima gathers me at the airport door. How would I pick out a trustworthy taxi driver among the lot strewn in front of me? Like so many street urchins from a Dickens novel, they each beg me to take a ride in their dressed up cab as we pass by. So Ngima choses our good man, and our taxi is just as cheerfully painted up as any other.  We fill the roof-top carriage with my trekking gear and climb in. I am excited to get my first glimps of Kathmandu! But hold on, we are abruptly pulled over by the police. We are still within the airport gates. I cant even see the street! But what's a few more minutes wait after 32 hours of travel from the U.S.?  

Our trusty driver sits patiently, acceptantly, like a father surrounded by his screaming children, while the officer scribbles down notes and circles our car. A few minutes later our driver accepts the ticket issued by the copper, not gladly with a nervous smile as I might have done, but begrudgingly and with a sense of defeat, knowing that this is the way things are. 

Now as we speed across town in between dead stops, Nepali people are buying colorful umbrellas at garage door shops, moving desk chairs on the backs of motorbikes and quickly navigating youngsters through bumper to bumper traffic.  Everyone with a horn is using it as if their lives depend on it, and the way they are driving, it just might! Our driver is stoic, efficient and accepting of the chaos all around us. 

On the plane from Denver to LA the woman sitting next to me was asked by the flight attendant to please put her bag completely under the seat in front of her. She turned to me and said with a touch of resentment, "What is with this false sense of security?".  However, knowing that any protest she could bring up would immediately be defeated, she did exactly as the flight attendant instructed her, just as my taxi driver took the ticket from the police officer without question. Did he resent the officer for providing a false sense of security too?

I remember telling a friend that graduate school was one of the biggest disappointments of my life.  I looked up to my professors and naively believed that they were smarter, harder working and more passionate than I. I thought that they possessed so much wisdome to impart upon me! But two years in I saw that my superiors were back-biting, insecure, and lacking in ethics.  I was disappointed in all of them and in the system that inadvertently cultivated these behavoirs. I completed my research, begrudgingly handed it to my advisor and with a sence of defeat, I walked away without my papers. 

I wonder is that what happens to individuals who grow up in a system that does not protect its people?  If the traveler next to me was resentful of seemingly unimportant regulations, and I became disillusioned after a mere twenty months at university what could happen to a person after twenty years of living within a governmental system that reneges on its promises and flaunts its corruption? Apathy? A feeling of Defeat? An acceptance of the way things are? 

I am in the birthplace of The Lord Buddha and he would say, "desire is the source of all suffering". The desire to change the way things are, causes much anxiety, true!  But if the Buddha were sitting next to me now I would ask in my entitled, first world, global view kidda way, "But is it wrong to try to make things better?"