Mrs. Miller and the Brexit

/ chrismoorman13 / 2 Comments

She stood at all of 5’1’’ at her peak, but her gravelly smoker’s voice could have stopped an elephant.  By the time I met her, the lines on her face were so deep that you could’ve lost a dime, but this tiny Jewish dynamo from Watertown, SD seemed to emanate a power that couldn’t accurately be described. Old enough that she didn’t subscribe to the politically correct notion of “treat all students equally”, she unabashedly picked favorites. Favorites were picked on the basis of talent first, and personality second. Her second career as an admissions officer at Northwestern University demanded that she size up talent accurately and quickly, and she did it in every aspect of her life.

Her favorites became an incredibly accomplished bunch, becoming New York Times bestselling authors, lawyers arguing monumental cases in front of the Supreme Court, CEOs, professors and more. She had a wide net in a rich intellectual pond, and she relished her ability to pick the best.

Joan Miller was probably 65 years old when a scrawny, bespectacled 13-year-old boy sat down before her in the front row of University Hall. Over the next three weeks, she taught me more than I would learn in the next four years. By the time I left her formal tutelage, Mrs. Miller had given me the most valuable of all gifts, the confidence to compete with anyone.

She was a debate coach first, foremost and always. Policy debate was her passion, and she trained generations of Highland Park high schoolers in the arts of persuasion and public speaking for decades. Later in life, she taught gifted high school students from across the globe, and they sought her out by name, wanting to come meet the Cicero of the North Shore.

I was fresh out of a small town in Indiana, where I’d been the smart kid for as long as I could remember. Getting to Northwestern, with kids who had already scored perfect SAT scores at the age of 13, I was in a whole different league now. Adolescence is full of self-doubt, but suddenly I was overcome with the palpable fear that I’d managed to fool everyone to this point; including myself.

Being from a small town herself, Mrs. Miller knew exactly what it was to be a doubt filled outsider from nowhere sitting down to their first class in University Hall. She’d done it herself 47 years earlier.

I can’t remember how long it took her to latch on to me, a few days at most, but she taught me the most valuable lesson that any child can be taught: “It doesn’t matter where you came from, only what you accomplish today.” Sitting next to the sons and daughters of CEO’s, published authors and the like, I didn’t need to be told that I was the peasant in the bunch. Sitting in my only faded Abercrombie shirt, anyone with eyes could see that. By Wednesday of that first week, she made me understand that it didn’t matter.

She gave us a crash course in policy debate, but more importantly she taught us how to be orators, able to communicate any message. From signposts to crescendo to speeding and spreading, she taught us how to logically trap opponents into forced agreement by framing an argument with simple proofs. It was all about framing your argument in Teflon, making sure that detracting arguments wouldn’t stick.

I got back from the Conquest and as I drove from Chicago towards Bedford, I called Mrs. Miller to tell her I’d gotten home safely. For all of the horrible stereotypes about Jews, the ones about Jewish mothers being unparalleled worriers are completely true from my experience, and Mrs. Miller had adopted me as her goyim grandson long ago.

The phone rang as I waited for that familiar croak or Don’s singsong voice shouting “Joanie, it’s Chris Moorman” up the stairs. When a different voice picked up, I think I knew before he said it.

I got to the side of the interstate and bawled. To this day I’m still not sure how long I sat there mourning a woman who gave me my only irreplaceable talent, a confident voice. 2 years later I’m sitting at the keyboard crying just as hard.

I didn’t mean to turn that into a written eulogy, but sometimes the dead deserve their due.

*********

Turns out that I told you that story so that you’d understand this one.

I waited up until 2AM on Thursday night, waiting for the Brexit results to come in. For those readers who know me well, staying up until 2AM for me requires wine, women, song and stimulants in great amounts. Or volatility.

The trader within me, like a catastrophic ex-girlfriend addiction, welled up to the point of bursting as the Brexit drew nearer. I would’ve given three toes off my left foot to have a real spec portfolio and platform last week. (The right foot being reserved for footy kicks obviously.) I read the news, watched the polls, and tried to figure out why every market had implied a 0% possibility of a Brexit. The polls appeared to be 50/50 but the world, both financial and media, was convinced that the establishment would win again, just like the Scottish Referendum in 2014.

And they were wrong.

Aside from my fanatic addiction to trading, I am also a student of history. Without getting too far into the weeds, I believe that in the modern era that history is on roughly an 80 year cycle starting with the wars of Spanish Succession (~1700).

1780, American and French Revolutions (Modern Conception of Representative Government)

1860- American Civil War/End of Chattel Slavery as an economic model in Western Societies

1940- Great Depression/WW2/Beginning of American Hegemony

2020-?

I truly believe that we are on the precipice of the next great sea change in history. Just as the world was a fundamentally different place before the revolutionary period surrounding 1780, so too were the rules of engagement fundamentally different from the beginning to the end of the next 2 sea changes.  

The Brexit is yet another signpost on the change that is coming. The postwar period in the Western World has been one of “peace at any cost.” I haven’t gotten the historiography up, but I am confident that you’d be hard pressed to find any 71 year period in European history with less bloodshed between the major powers.

This has all been accomplished through a consistent tightening of bonds between the major (and now minor) powers. Like a jerry rigged team building exercise, Europe has sought to tie a large rope around the herd. While this makes it tough to fight, it also makes it tough to get anywhere. The rope took the form of endless regulations, agreed to by appointed diplomats and administered by countless unelected bureaucrats. The rule of law acted as the large shield built by patchwork.

Going back to another era in European history, the Greek Phalanx was once the greatest fighting force ever seen. Its power was not that of nuclear weapons or superior firepower, it was in the uniformity of action among the men who filled its ranks. So long as everyone moved in lockstep, a gapless shield wall protected while a series of marching spears methodically marched down more freewheeling enemies.

Discipline was the secret sauce of the phalanx. The spears and shields used were no more advanced than the enemy, only the method of utilization. The phalanx depended on an implicit social contract however, and that was one of a mutually desired outcome. Shared goals are a great way to keep discipline; consequences and fear, much less so.  

Peace was the shared goal of the EU for many decades. Peace was seen as the desirable byproduct of free trade, a mutually beneficial tightening of bonds. Familiarity breeds contempt however, and soon peace was seen as a given instead of a goal. The resulting philosophical shuffle from peace to “prosperity” has had many ramifications, from the sovereign debt crisis to the ever widening inclusion of new members on the margin.

Goals are hard enough to agree initially, but changing goals midstream means that formerly happy bedfellows can begin staring down very different motivations. The EU started out as an economic free trade zone, now it was starting to look like a federal government run by unelected bureaucrats.

Looking around the world, unelected bureaucrats running supranational organizations don’t work tremendously well (see FIFA, IOC, FIA, IMF, UN…) Technology might have made information more readily available, but the human brain does not follow Moore’s Law, and to try to rule across cultures, mores, and continents from 100k feet does not allow anyone to see what happens on the ground. Fiascos like the upcoming Brazilian Olympics (or better yet, the Greek Olympics that set the whole EU sovereign debt fiasco in motion) occur because the separation between noble ideals and workable plans become yawning chasms made invisible from the heights of the ivory tower. Leadership in these organizations find themselves find themselves in a gilded cage of “high minded ideals” yet their proclamations have real effects on real, breathing people.  

My people. Not the sons and daughters of the 1% that I tried to fit in with so long ago at Northwestern, but the children of the working poor who grew up in those Lawrence County trailer parks, to whom the debate over minimum wage is more than an academic exercise in economic modeling. The children of meth addicts who came, dirty and underfed every August into my mother’s kindergarten classroom. To my high school friends, who left as green 18 year old kids, and returned glassy eyed veterans from a warzone that they should have never been asked to go to, looking for a pill or a needle or a bottle to take away the horrors of war. To the mothers of those same veterans, who intrinsically knew that her son was safer in Iraq than in the decaying small town where he was born.

In the words of Churchill, “Democracy is the worst government ever designed, except all the others.” While democracy has wrongly become framed a modern euphemism for “freedom”, as opposed to an inclusive yet neutral system for the allocation of governmental powers, the EU started to look like something different. The emergency monetary powers granted to the EU during the sovereign debt crisis became standard, and the mechanism for power allocation went further and further afield from classic representative democracy.

Democracy’s success is inexplicably intertwined with its trust in the people. All the people, not just those at the top. The woman looking in the mirror knows her struggles better than any technocrat in the capital ever will. If her vote displeases the bureaucratic establishment, then I challenge our rulers to come out of their ivory towers.

Because we’ve got a war going on down here. It is not a war of choice but of survival. It is a war against a never ending barrage of awful choices. This is not some political euphemism, like “the war on women” or a high school football coach telling his team to prepare for “48 mintues of war.” This is a real one, costing life and limb and opportunity, and the casualties stack up every day.

The EU referendum seemed like a low risk means of shoring up a mandate when David Cameron proposed it. Europe was on a path for more cohesiveness, not less, and Cameron calculated that he could ride that wave. Somewhere along the line however, he found that himself and his government pulled under by an unseen undertow.

Having made more than a few British friends during the Conquest, I found myself intrigued by their multiparty parliamentary democracy as opposed to the binary two party democracy of the US. It seemed to me that the views of individuals were better reflected by varying degrees of the UK political parties. Whereas the US is told to vote with whatever party better reflects 51% of their views, the UK had a variety of parties to choose from, from Conservative to Labour, UKIP to Green.

The British system engendered a belief in the voting population that 51% agreement should not be tolerated. Various parties aligned platforms that reflected much more of the views of the voter. When projecting this inherent belief against the technocracy ruling the EU, the population saw themselves being a party to a supranational system unlike their domestic one.

Once the Brexit passed, the blame began in earnest. Claims of xenophobia, isolationism and outright stupidity were leveled at the majority of Britons who voted in favor of leaving the EU.

Enter the lessons of Mrs. Miller.

Just as she taught me to frame an argument with simple, unassailable claims, so too did the Brexit debate seek to distill an immensely complex issue into a series of binary questions.

Britain will be fine in the long term. They are one of a few indispensable nations on earth, and whatever the short-term fallout from the Brexit, they will always find themselves with a seat at any table that matters. The specific economic and social arguments surrounding the Brexit are far less important than what they have accomplished in traditional English fashion.

When the scourge of Nazism seemed destined to overwhelm Europe, they were presented with a seemingly horrible offer from one of the greatest leaders in European history, Winston Churchill: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat”

In a courageous act, Britain looked at a system of power allocation and said, “No thanks” in opposition to the entire global establishment. To write off a majority vote as “that of the stupid and uneducated” should bring about a whole different kind of debate about the state of public education if nothing else. Again, in the vein of framing an argument, I can almost hear Mrs. Miller asking a set of leading cross-examination questions, “Are you opposed to immigration? Do you consider yourself a racist? Would you ignore the advice of a medical professional in matters of health? Would you consider a doctor to be an expert? Does an intelligent person ignore the advice of experts?”

As Mrs. Miller taught us to debate, it was all academic so she could afford to leave out that most important lesson about framing.

Any art collector can tell you, frames are meant to be hung.

As we frame the political opposition in increasingly stark terms, I fear we are edging closer to hanging ourselves. Let’s think about framing things in a different way.

The Conquistador’s Lament

/ chrismoorman13 / Leave a comment

I’ve put off writing the concluding post to the Latin America leg of the Conquest for long enough. It is time to try to put into words what the constantly smiling gringo felt so vividly for two weeks.

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We went to Iguazu Falls for Ben and the girls’ last leg of the trip. After 36 hours, Ben would fly off to Ibiza and the girls would continue onto Brazil for the next leg of their trip. I was heading back to Buenos Aires, excited about the prospect of exploring on my own terms, but missing the companionship of more travel partners I might never see again.

I checked into a hostel called “The Pink House.” That is a play on the name of the presidential mansion in Buenos Aires, known as Casa Rosada. It was spartan but clean in the Recoleta neighborhood, which I wanted to explore from instead of our further west initial place in trendy Palermo.

Recoleta is not really setup for tourists outside of the few blocks around the famed cemetery that holds Evita’s remains along with the dearly departed phenomenal mausoleum builders, some of which are seen below. Past that, it is very much a nice but ungentrified neighborhood in Central BA, serving as a portal to the governmental and financial districts. It is also a Jewish district, bringing me back to my first international travels where the herd of the very Catholic Stall family stuck out like sore thumbs among the Abraham Lincoln-esque costumes in the Jewish Orthodox neighborhood of Westminster.

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I found some fine restaurants around the area, as well as a very overrated hamburguesa. There were plenty of cafes to hole up in on a rainy day, reading Seneca and then the mindblowing Kierkegaard. My appreciation for comprehensible philosophy grew in an unbelievable way. It is one thing to try to tackle Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It is something vastly different to read Seneca’s common language letter to his best friend.

My days were filled with walking through antique shops on the way to the next cafe, late nights at jazz clubs, and treating myself to phenomenal steaks and Malbecs. Vicky continued to show me around in BA in a way that I never could’ve seen as a tourist, and the experiences continued to be incredible.

On Sunday morning, I trudged through a persistent drizzle towards San Telmo, about 4 miles from my hostel. About ⅔ of the way there, I got tired of being rained on and decided to get a coffee and a sandwich in the next cafe I came across. Bar de Cao was a relic from another age. 115 years old, it had wine bottles all over the walls, important documents from the history of Buenos Aires that had been signed there, and a spiked coffee named after Hemingway to boot.

There were 4 waitresses, one older and the other three about my age. They took turns swooping in on the gringo, with the short one (though still wearing 3 inch multicolored foam platforms on the bottom of her black sneakers) taking the first turn.

As my coffee turned into a ham sandwich, which turned into a glass of Malbec, the girls all took their turn seeing what they could get the blue eyed gringo to say. I sat there writing about one of them, as I often do while people watching.

Describing a living breathing person in minute detail who is interacting with the world and only very rarely you, that is a powerful writing exercise. The way she buttered the toast that she kept munching on, and the rhythm of her fingernails clicking the bar. The things that her body language said as she interacted with other patrons and staff. The way her mole wiggled as she laughed at my broken Spanish, and the muted one heeled turn she employed when walking away. All of these things are what makes real characters in fiction, a keen look at behaviors without becoming a direct (and therefore contaminating) influence. I’d be willing to wager great money that more than a few famous characters were the result of people watching in a bar with a notebook.

I sat there, writing away, both a character description and the outline of a novel, as I continued to soak up all the sensory perceptions that I could in a place that I might never come to again. Suddenly the older waitress comes bombing over to my table and says “Bag! You bag!”

Pretty startled from my dreamlike character study, I patted my wallet and said “No bag. All good.” She quickly grabbed a bartender who then grabbed the man sitting with his back to me at the table behind me, tossing him into the street. Apparently the man was feeling my coat, which was full of $400 worth of pesos, as I had just exchanged money that morning. The waitresses, now clucking around hen-like, never gave me more than 5 minutes without a visit again.

This was great service.

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As I paid my bill, a comical $13 for 2 glasses of wine, a sandwich and a spiked coffee, I used my newly acquired Spanish to ask my muse for directions to the San Telmo market. Her body language immediately changed into one I hadn’t yet recognized, one leaning slightly forward in a vulnerable position, made incredibly disconcerting to an American boy with a huge weakness for Latin American women. We stumbled through my request, plenty of looking down and laughing as we both butchered the other’s language. Finally I got my directions and put on my green rain shell, and as I walked away from her, she lightly brushed my shoulder with her outstretched hand, raising the hair down my spinal column like contact with light electricity.

Vowing in blood to teach myself Spanish upon return to the US. I set off to a bookstore to find a Spanish fairy tale book to read to the ever growing legion of kids that my friends continue to hand off to “dear Uncle Moorman.” I figure start small and work up. No way I’m going to get anything out of trying to read Borges in Spanish.

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The next day, as I boarded the plane, I said goodbye to a country that found its way into my heart in the first 3 hours of my arrival, I wondered if I would get back. I tell myself I will, but then again there are a lot of places in that category at this point. International flights are the expensive part of travel, and that budget is shrinking rapidly as the business requires capital to grow.

Someday, when we get the business humming like it should, maybe I’ll go back. But it’ll be different, it always is. A few of the restaurants I grew to love will be out of business for one reason or another, the currency will have appreciated so that my beloved $12 steak is now $25. Vicky will be on assignment in Paraguay, or whatever far flung reaches of Latin America offer Deloitte the most billable hours, and the red wine won’t ever taste as sweet as that first Carmenere on the veranda of our AirBnB in Palermo.

Maybe that’s a pessimistic way to look at it, and I should adopt Ben’s travel thesis of, “every time in a place is different. It is the traveller’s job to separate them and don’t let the bad bleed into the magic of a first impression.”

Well that’s not quite how he says it, but it is the gist.

My time in Buenos Aires was incredibly magical. To kiss a gorgeous, intelligent and (really freaking tall) Argentinian girl in the midnight rain down a sidestreet lit up only by the neon of restaurants and bars, as you’ve just walked out of seeing a 17 piece jazz band that resolutely reconfirmed your love of live music. To walk back soaked to the bone, with a smile on your face because you stole a scene in life that is only real in the movies.

That’s magic.

That is undeniable, in your face, think about it on your deathbed with a smile on your face stuff.

Most of the time we let all of our moments bleed together, letting the bad stain the good with marks that won’t come off, but why? What do we gain by trying to compress our experience into a format where the greatest are marred by the average and the mundane?

So many moments of my life are compressed into a slurry that reminds me of the stuff inside of chicken nuggets. Sure, I think back on years of my life and I have some memory that will make me smile, but these are momentary placeholders in years of forgettable (and forgotten) experiences. A stolen chicken nugget tastes great, but eating the box of 20 at McDonald’s is a shit way to spend the 3 hours after a meal.

I am so glad that I’ve realized this early, and made it my goal in life to appreciate moments in real time. How few times do we realize how truly content we are in the moment itself? Most of the time it is the bitter memory of a time that was better than now, picked from the slurry of forgettable years.

Moments like that don’t just happen on travel. They happen every day. It is the “Eureka!” moment that comes in the business when you realize where the funding is coming from, or it is the moment when you take your highly technical designs to a Purdue professor, and have him stand up impressed.

These are moments that have to be savored in the moment to be properly remembered in the future. It is not a quantity race. It isn’t an Instagram picture from Greece with 200 likes in a moment that you don’t really remember because you were hammered. It can be the sunrise coming over a cornfield, or a moment of achievement after work well done. It can be the first time that baby grabs your hand, or the moment when your 6 year old finally starts turning his shoulders and hitting everything in sight in Coach’s Pitch.

It is about recognizing it, not has a hazy also ran picked from the lot, but as a vivid experience that gives you strength to think about.

As Seneca said in that letter to his friend, “Everyone hurries his life along and is troubled by a longing for the future and a weariness for the present.”

Don’t be that person. Don’t be caught in a trap of “tomorrow will be different.” Live a life as a collection of moments that you will think back on in the past and say, “Well if I made it out of a 14 mile mapless bicycle odyssey around Buenos Aires in the dark, surely I can make it through this.”

That navigation fiasco could’ve been a real game changer in my time in Argentina. I could’ve had a real go at Ben and ruined our dynamic for the rest of the trip. Instead, it ends up being one of the truly treasured experiences of my trip, one where I learned to just keep pedaling and figure it out.

When I got back and did tersely tell Ben that he left me without a map and I didn’t appreciate it, he incredulously looked at me and said, “Listen mate, you’re an independent guy and you figured it out, I don’t see the problem.” He didn’t, and after 2 glasses of red wine, I didn’t either.

Nothing was irreparably broken, so why not enjoy the next sip of wine and let it go?

That’s a life worth living, where our triumphs are learned from and remembered, and our failures are learned from and left to the slurry of unfocused memories.

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I’m glad I figured that out now, I’ve still got quite a few years before the scales fell from my eyes to catch up on.

There is truly wisdom to be learned from men who wrote down how to not take life too seriously. I’m glad that I stumbled upon Seneca and his brand of no nonsense Stoicism. To read it, take it in and digest it was truly a gift to have been done in Buenos Aires. To look around and say that I am in this moment and there is no where else I’d rather be, because tomorrow this won’t be the same. That’s a truly magical experience, no matter where it is.
Look for a few more of those. You’ll thank me when you find them.

If Heaven Ain’t Like Buenos Aires, then I Don’t Want to Go.

/ chrismoorman13 / 1 Comment

Scrawled onto the folded backs of two large white placemats from Cafe Thibon was the sum of my afternoon writing yesterday.Starting slowly yesterday, I walked along Ave de Santa Fe towards the Recoleta neighborhood to meet Vicky for lunch. We met, (she was late, but the whole country is late so…there’s that) and I quickly ignored her recommendation to stay away from the mondongo, and piled right in.

Mondongo is something in Argentina that could be passably described as “cow stomach curry.” It is a mix of vegetables, lentils, blood sausages and chorizo, stewed together in a base yellow sauce, with two inch chunks of stomach thrown in for the main meat.

When in Rome right?

It was actually very good so long as I didn’t look directly at the piece of stomach as I lifted the spoon to my mouth. The ridges and seemingly jelly-fish like frills of stomach lining were a bit less than appetizing, but after the first bite, it wasn’t going to kill me.

While I tried my best blue eyed poor me act to get Vicky to get a carafe of wine and skip the rest of the dwindling afternoon of work, I failed, and so was left to my own devices.

I was going to go to the cathedral, but I was sidetracked along the way by a set of faces that made me quickly question where I was. I stopped into Cafe Thibon, to recollect my thoughts and get a cup of coffee to put me over the mid-afternoon drop nods.

Cafe Thibon is part liquor store, part cafe. The green granite bar prominently displays two vintage sets of Malbec, while a taciturn and portly old man dropped clean silverware into a worn wooden box between the espresso makers. My seat had me looking out into the street, but the wooden boxes of wine were stacked so high that I could only see a sliver through the open door. The occasional biker would flit by, only staying in my sight for a second, while the seemingly endless supply of grand old men with their ringed fingers and sweater covered walrusy midsections wandered by the displays of wines and liquors.

Behind me to my right was one of these old men, looking like he could’ve been the Argentinian brother of Bloomberg’s Tom Keene. He had a regal mane of white on the sides but very little on top, so to compensate, he combed his hair back, those wiry white strands, so that they connected, much like an electrical circuit that would fail if connections were breached. His forearms pressed flat on the table next to his newspaper, his left hand would go up like clockwork every 4-5th breath, pressing those hairs back towards their more numerous counterparts.

As I started to doodle on a placemat, I looked over the names of the wines in the glass cases beside me. Alamos, Angelica Zapata, Los Arboles, and Catena were a few of the more prominent names. The crackling of AM Spanish language radio could be heard faintly, with the tunes of jingles rolling together with the music to my untrained ear.

Cafe Thibon roasted their own coffee which they kept in massive glass cylinders on the back counter. Their gold domed tops seemed to be lacking only a crescent moon from the mosque tops I’d seen throughout the Middle East. An old fashioned balance, worn black with the grease of hands and the decades of coffee, is used to determine the amount of coffee sold. The curmudgeonly old man would gently place the cylindrical weight on one side and a bag on the other before tapping out a few beans into the bag, frowning, and repeating the process again and again until symmetry was achieved.

As he finished one bag, he reached his sausage fingers into a large dish of stuffed olives, selecting three, then rolling them around in his palm with a move from his thick thumb. Examination done, he clutched down on two and ejected one into his open mouth, before putting those two with some others that he’d soon serve me.

I asked the waitress for a glass of Malbec. Sure it was 3:00 in the afternoon, but I was on holiday for Chrissake. As I sipped the delightful house offering, I started to visualize the rhythm of Buenos Aires in a way that I had not before. Just as some people can pick up the beat of a song from just a handful of notes, so too can one feel the cadence of a city. The way that old men shuffle  down sidewalks and the rapidity that cabs take off from red lights, these are but a few small sample pulses from the beating heart of a city. The overheard intonation of a conversation and the movements of waitress, these too show la tiempo de vivre. In a place like Argentina, the home of one of the world’s most famous dances, the Tango, this rhythm takes on even more meaning. Plain as the smell of a place or the mountains and rivers that comprise its landscape, the rhythm is as real as the nose on your face once you have trained yourself to look.

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Ever since I was a little boy, I loved to go wandering through the hustle and bustle of a city anonymously. My father used to drop me off in the Loop of Chicago with my cousin Brad, who usually still had a few hours of work left before going home. Brad would rip a sheet of stationary so that I had his address, and then tell me to go wander around until 5, and to ask for help if I got lost.

Nothing like free range cousin-ing right?

I always longed for the feeling of aimless anonymity walking past thousands of people where no one knows your name. This effect is only amplified when one does not understand the language as throngs of people are living lives truly parallel to my own, a graceful mystery save for a the few non-verbal cues that I can ascertain.

I find myself with odd sense of deja vu here in Buenos Aires. I’ve certainly never gone on a prolific enough bender to have gotten here and back in a timely fashion, so all of my experiences should be new ones. These senses are not that of interaction wtih place, but instead the briefest inclination that I have seen the face of one of my deceased loved ones.

Yesterday I was walking down a side street in Palermo, as an old man shuffled closer with his head down. As I got within arm’s length of him, he picked his cabbie hatted head up a little bit, and to my shock and surprise, the face of Uncle Bill Kay was smiling back at me. The crinkled skin around his very round eyes and the way his face was always reminiscent of a round faced white owl who had been turned into an eternally boyish old man, this was the face that peeked out from under that cap. For that briefest of seconds, I saw those blue eyes twinkle at me once more, just like they did for so many Christmases of my youth.

Just as quickly he was gone, like a warm blooded ghost who had disappeared into the wall. As I walked onward, this feeling of seeing someone I loved out of the corner of my eye only increased. As soon as I turned to look, they were always gone.

I started thinking about Buenos Aires as my heaven replacement. Maybe all of my loved ones are here, living lives that no longer diverge with my own, but still loving, living and breathing as they did when our lives intersected. Perhaps Uncle Bill gets up every morning about 9AM, dresses impeccably in his blazer, sweater vest and scarf, and heads over to Cafe Thibon for his morning coffee, where he banters with the waitress, and playfully argues with the similarly dressed man sitting next to him about tomorrow’s weather. Then he shuffles in his leather shoes over to the park, where he plays chess with the other old men and talks about the romantic conquests of his youth, before going home to the butcher and picking up a slice of meat to grill and eat with his evening wine.

I’ve read enough of the Bible to know, that the actual cardinal directions to “Heaven” were quite general. Who is to say that our loved ones don’t merely move on to this Paris of the Southern Hemisphere and continue living lives with hopes, fears, joys and pains? It seems equally comforting to me, that if I continue to travel the ends of the earth, that I might for the most instantaneous of seconds, get to see that loved one of mine in a moment that requires neither acknowledgement or discussion, only the feeling of a full heart and a sense of contentment that all is as it should be.

Even if it is just Uncle Bill’s doppelganger, I wouldn’t trade the brief blissful feeling of Resurrection for all the facts on Earth.

Some mysteries are better left in the ether.

Zen and the Art of Being Lost in Buenos Aires

/ chrismoorman13 / 1 Comment

There is a half read book on my nightstand at home called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In it, Robert Pirsig takes a trip across the American West on his motorcycle with his slightly autistic son and a couple of friends. Most people look at that title and wonder what kind of drugs someone had to be on to come up with something so inane. Having read a good half of it, before other books jumped up the ladder, I find that some of the most instructive tomes about life seem to be the most random.

I had my own moment of Zen on a pushbike yesterday. Fearing that the weather might turn rainy later in the week, we tried to get out and see as much as we could yesterday. A trip to the Recoleta Cemetery, a place that puts the greatest of New Orleans mausoleums to shame, and a lunch of empanadas and tortas had shown us two different neighborhoods, but we resolved to get some bikes and make our own tour.

No one moves very quickly in Argentina, and the nonchalance with respect to time has already infected us, so by time we actually got to the bike shop, it was nearly 4PM. Being winter in the Southern Hemisphere, we only had about two hours of daylight left to burn. We grabbed a couple of maps and headed off through a city seen as one of the most bikeable in the world.

Then things started to go a bit haywire. Ben and I lost the girls after about 10 minutes of riding, which was probably to be expected. We meandered along some bike trails, edging closer to the water, but only getting into the port district. Seemingly anywhere in the world, you’d never prefer to be by the docks as the sunsets, but there we were.

Also, as opposed to nearly EVERY map I’ve ever seen in this life, the map given to us by the bike shop was oriented not on a North/South axis, but instead on the city grid of Buenos Aires, which was laid with a datum relative to the river instead of cardinal directions. This meant that saying I want to go “up” on the map than I am now was a very trying experiment in map turning.

About 7 miles from home, my chain came off and became wedged between the sprocket and chain guard. Having no tools and not enough Spanish to figure out “wrench” we battled with the bike for about ten minutes before deciding that I should just throw it into a cab and head back before it got dark. Ben grabbed my map and headed back on his bike, because neither of us fancied a nocturnal bike ride around a city we’d known for only 24 hours.

I thought getting a cab would be easy, but no one wanted to let me put my greasy bike (and even greasier hands) in their tiny Peugeot cab. So I stood there slackjawed, wondering how in the world I was going to make it home without a map, Spanish skills and a bike a chain off the rails and no way to fix it. Finally a security guard finally took pity on me and brought me out a pair of pliers, and I quickly got the bike back in working order. Then a couple of Venezuelans came and took pity on me, giving me some very general directions toward the Palermo neighborhood where I’d started. At this point, I was nearly 6 miles away with a very quickly setting sun.

I took their advice to the best of my ability, taking a bike path to the end of the line (praying that I’d come out at the CORRECT end.) A quote from Pirsig started to hum in my ears as my mindset moved from annoyed to determined.

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

Trying to isolate the pattern, both in my own life and in this particular bicycle marooning, was a trying exercise. I had left the docks, where I at least knew my general relative position to home, moving in a direction that the Venezuelans promised would take me home. Having no  geographic context  to draw from, I had to stay 100% true to their directions or I’d end up god knows where.

Looking back on my own life, I recognize the same pattern. So many people put their heads down and start charging off in a direction given to them by others, only to find that the slightest deviation in direction will leave them stranded with no idea how to get either back from whence they came or forward to an original destination.

That is why the need for context is sacrosanct. Knowing only a handful of street names, my context in this odyssey was very limited, so I was dependent on external forces to give me a direction. The more streets that one recognizes, the more able to self-help he becomes. He recognizes small mistakes before they lead so far off track that it loses all feasibility.

The same is true in life. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be rich and live in NYC. I grew up on a diet of Friends, Seinfeld and the Wall Street Journal, and I knew that at the Southern tip of an island at the center of the world, my dreams would all come true. (There is currently a gingery Semite, a sleeping Indian, an illiterate Italian, and a bald…well whatever Gar is, reading this and laughing hysterically that I thought that all my dreams would come true in our dingy corner of the financial world.)

I got to my destination, and for a while, I loved it. The stress, the money, the comical number of amazing women to be found in Manhattan…this is what I came for.

Then complacency snuck in. My whole life had been about getting to this place, covering the distance, both physical and cultural, that lay between the sleepy cornfield I’d grown up in and the screaming trading pits that I so desperately wanted to be a part of. Once I’d stopped “pedaling” as I arrived at my destination, I got nervous that the bike would fall over on top of me.

Back in Buenos Aires, the sun had set and the buildings weren’t getting any nicer. I followed Cordoba street until it Y’d off. Inevitably, I took the wrong side of the Y. Pedaling faster was motion, but it was not to be confused with progress by any means. I was merely going faster in the wrong direction for 20 blocks.

Finally I began asking anyone standing still how to get to Palermo. My original directions were now defunct, and the only way I’d get home was to find a new set. An older woman (hell this is South America, she could’ve been 35 or 55 and I wouldn’t know the difference) told me that I was at least 40 blocks from Palermo, but if I went up 3 streets and turned right, that I would get onto Serrano and as long as I kept pedaling, I’d get to somewhere I’d recognize.

Now I had a direction that would turn my motion into progress. This was the “eureka” moment that gave purpose to what was otherwise aimless wandering.

Sure enough, after hoofing it 14 miles around Buenos Aires, I came up to the Plaza de Armes and knew that the bike shop was just around the corner.

Eureka moments happen in all facets of life, not just with hopelessly lost Americans on pushbikes. Mine happened on that brutally cold February morning in Chicago, that moment when I knew that I was headed in the wrong direction. So I asked if I could follow someone else’s for a while, and much to my benefit, he said yes. Eventually Ben’s direction and mine diverged, but that was alright, because I had enough context to self-correct. My direction is rarely perfect, but knowing that a path is the wrong one is always worth something.

If I’ve got one lesson to teach anyone, let it be the danger of sheepishly following along. One has to find their own direction, otherwise we’re just eating and shitting until we die.

Also though, I’d still advise a map in Buenos Aires, but boy can you learn a few things without one.

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.” Robert Pirsig

A Santiago Morning

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As I awoke this morning I battled the in-line water heater for a minute before finally getting enough scalding hot water to wash. The temperature was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the steam condensed on the window quickly as I shaved in my pre-caffeinated stupor.

Packing up my things, I headed down to Cafe Caribe for one more fine coffee con leche before loading up to head to Buenos Aries. Cafe Caribe is known as “coffee with legs” here in Santiago. The bright marble interior is lined with a nickel plated 4 foot tall bar and the waitresses are all wearing skin tight dresses cut as high as the least modest family friendly business could possibly allow.

The waitresses are by no means the most beautiful women one will find in Chile. Most are hardscrabble old dames more on the build of an aged cocktail waitress in an off-strip Las Vegas casino. There was one at the cafe this morning who was much younger than the others, an amply fleshed blonde with a round pretty face. She immediately took my coffee ticket, speaking rapidly in Spanish with a bashful look on her face. I merely smiled, having no idea what she was trying to say before muttering, “Si.”

Properly caffeinated, I took off for one more walk around the area. Plaza del Armas, the square reminiscent of the main one in Madrid, was a hotbed of commuting activity. The dark skies started to open up to a steely grey as the limestone edifices of 200 year old buildings gave way to the gleaming glass structures of more recent history. Shoe shine men seemed to have popped up everywhere, their polish smells wafting into a mix of bakery and coffee scents.
I smiled the whole time I walked. This is what I live for. The validation that “normal life” takes many forms throughout the world gives one confidence that an intrepid spirit will always find a way to survive.

The stray dogs playing in the street were barking as the cabrieros stood in parade on the north edge of the square. Horses and Belgian Malinois stood in their police “coats” as a discussion of daily tactics took place. Women sold everything from toilet paper to fresh squeezed orange juice from makeshift storefronts on shopping carts. The occasional old man would walk by in his professor like blazer with an alpaca scarf wrapped around his wrinkled neck, even less frequent but still present were the men who knew just enough “Ingles” to come and ask if I had a packet of cigarettes.

Those early morning moments where I let myself be bustled through an urban crowd, similar, but still so different from those that I was a part of, are the moments that I enjoy most on travel. All the restaurants and points of interest mean much less than the realization that life occurs in all forms all throughout the world.
It is why I travel, and now it is onto Argentina to see one more functioning civilization, and what it has to offer.

The Road Less Traveled By

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The night of April 30, 2012 was a miserable night that I’ll never forget. Driving a 24 foot U-Haul through the crowded streets of Manhattan, I had the accumulated possessions of myself, Dane May and Ryan Moore as we headed from our first homes in the Village to our massive (by NYC standards) flat in TriBeCa. I was driving while Dane sat in the second seat. Ryan was crammed into the middle area without a proper seat complaining that he had been smashed in like a secondhand accordion. A few wrong turns due to some dodgy directions and we were forced across the Brooklyn Bridge with no alternative than to go to Brooklyn and turn around to head back to the island.

We arrived about 11:15PM to an absolute trash heap. The previous occupants had been bankers, and had spent the last week of their lease playing cocaine flip cup with strippers and had left mounds of trash stacked 5 feet high. We had a U-Haul full of our possessions that had to be returned that night otherwise we’d be paying a $250 ticket as well as an additional day on the truck.

Our friends, lovable bro-snakes that they were, were there waiting to help us move in our stuff in. They laughed, well more of a hearty grimace with sound, as they walked into our “new palace.” Shuffling through trash as we tried to pile it all into the living room, we got our possessions in and the truck returned about 3:00.

This was our 5 man pad, and it was an adventure in anthropological studies. More than one morning I awoke to a roommate with a club girl on the counter whom I had to move to make my morning coffee on the way to the exchange.

It wasn’t the cleanest or the most comfortable place but it was a place of massive maturation. A few weeks after we moved in, Dane came to the roommates and said that he had a proposition. An Aussie friend of a friend, Ben Harrison, was moving to NYC for the summer and was trying to avoid hiring his own apartment given the credit limitations of foreigners for a 4 month temp visa. He was offering to pay a chunk of rent to put a loft in our massive “activities” area, where we had a full sized basketball backboard and a ping pong table. Always the cheapass, I wholeheartedly said yes, and everyone else shrugged as they indifferently agreed.

Ben had been coordinating outdoor music festivals in Oz for years and was now looking to come over and scrap his way to the top of electronic music in NYC. His girlfriend was a dance captain for a Broadway show, and this was an opportunity to spend time with her personally while advancing himself professionally.

From almost no contacts save for a few club guys we knew, Ben managed to make himself invaluable to in the electronic music scene, finally being given a 5% ownership stake of a club for sweat equity.

This wasn’t his foremost achievement. That would be me.

I’d always had a desire to travel. My parents made the “interesting” decision to allow me and my slightly older friend Alex Barnes to go visit our friends ‘ family, the Stalls, who made an expat career move to London for a few years. At the time, it was a 12 year old and 15 year old navigating through an England with only our paper traveler’s cheques and a tube map with a 20 pence piece taped to it, the Stall’s phone number scrawled across the front.

We survived, as you do, after several hair raising adventures, discussion of which still brings tears of laughter to our eyes.

I also had the opportunity to travel heaps with my parents within the continental US. California, Colorado, Oregon, and large swaths of the midwest and east coast had been visited, either in family vacations or when I got to spend a school year travelling with my father as he hawked asphalt planers, stump grinders, and slot cutters across the US.

Internationally I was still a neophyte though, and Benny told me about his unbelievable travels over the past 7 years. He’d been to something like 35 countries at that point, backpacking through Europe and North Africa for nearly a year when he was 21. This was how he’d become a friend of a friend, but his travel network was unparalleled.

I was amazed that someone could do that. Vacations in the US were nearly always under 2 weeks, with the majority of one’s 15 days being spent on obligatory holidays, weddings and funerals. I never envisioned time during my career to go travel for long stretches like Ben had. It was interesting to talk about but this was the life of someone else. I was a trader, and traders had to be trading. A week here and there might be taken off, but there was no possibility of taking a massive hiatus and expecting a job when I returned.

Fast forward 3 years, and I have since traveled to all 6 continents and 16 countries. Ben and I as of 7PM local time on July 31, 2015 had joined the 5 continent club, having seen North America, Europe, Australia, Asia and South America together. Not bad considering we live on opposite sides of the world most of the time.

Ben taught me that there is no such thing as the “way.” There are goals and the motivation to achieve them, and every way one chooses leads somewhere. Those who end up in a place where they are unhappy have chosen ways, or lacked the motivation to achieve goals that would’ve been more fulfilling.

One day I decided the path I was on would only lead to a life that I was unhappy with, so I jumped off, emailed Ben and in fewer than 10 words told him that I wanted to try another way for a while.

That took me on the trip of a lifetime, and totally refocused my perspective from one driven by money and the status afforded it, to one where I wanted to do legitimate good in the world. After a nasty case of the post travel blues, that perspective allowed me to start my own company with my brother and one of our best friends. The idea is simple, that fruit and vegetable production worldwide is not able to satisfy the needs to the 7 billion humans currently milling about earth. We intend to change that with technology and hard work, and given the incredible technical skills of Erik and Jesse, I believe with every ounce of my being that we will.

It never would’ve happened had I not gone through a miserable night in a trash pile of an apartment, unloading a 3 beds, couches and everything else up a 1.5 floor walkup.

It wouldn’t have happened if I’d merely laughed when Ben told me that a lifestyle of travel was possible for anyone, not just the lucky lot in music.

It never would’ve happened if one day I looked in the mirror and said, “the money isn’t worth losing your soul. Do something different or you’ll never achieve a goal worth a tinker’s piss.”

Now we’re working on changing the world for the better, providing nutritious food to a population literally starving for it.

And I’m about a half of glass of red deep on my 6th continent in 3 years.

Here’s to two roads, and choosing the one less travelled by.
It has made all the difference. Thank you Ben Harrison, how about some champagne to celebrate?

The Post Racial Wasteland

/ chrismoorman13 / 2 Comments

The current state of race relations in America has been boiled down to the recent outrage over police brutality in minority neighborhoods. While many barrels of ink and pixels of screen space have been used to decry the deplorable state of policing in at-risk minority neighborhoods, very little has been used to look at the root of the problem.

Self-selecting communities have been a little mentioned effect of the post civil rights era. As strict institutional barriers regarding mobility among races fell by the wayside, the less rigid barriers erected by the free market took their place. What we now face, is a prototypical South Africa drawn up on the lines of wealth as opposed to institutional racism.

I had the opportunity to see Johannesburg, South Africa through a variety of lenses typically unavailable to an American tourist. After 5 months of traveling through Australia and Southeast Asia, I landed in Johannesburg to take part in the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders showcase. Alongside the literally towering figures of Dikembe Mutumbo, Andrei Kirilenko and the first African born GM in NBA history, Masai Ujiri, I saw 50 of the most talented young athletes on the continent, while taking in sites from “the other half” or more accurately the other 90% in post-apartheid South Africa.

Our days were spent at the gleaming American school on the outskirts of Jo-Burg proper. A facility that would’ve made many prestigious American schools blush with inadequacy, the school was a shining beacon. It was also surrounded by the ubiquitous razorwire fences that had become as much a part of the South African landscape as the baobao and marula trees. Post-apartheid South Africa dealt with the institutional policies that made racism a part of the land, but in an economic climate that sees white South Africans bring home an annual income nearly on par with Americans, the black population sees on average 1/7th of that.

The first thing that I was told in Johannesburg was to exercise extreme caution. Expensive jewelry, phones and computers were to be kept in a bag, if not locked up away from your person. To be mugged in Jo-Burg is not a matter of “if” but “when.”

That crime was considered such a fact of life was a concept completely foreign to me. Besides a few minor dustups in Vietnam and Thailand, I had encountered no such crime in my travels up to this point in areas far poorer by per capita GDP measures.

As I wandered, Christopher Columbus style for the lack whites that I saw, through the Central Business district, I realized that the crime seen in South Africa was not a case of absolute poverty so much as the corrosive nature of relative poverty, a condition much more likely to yield violent and volatile results. White South Africans (and a growing black plutocrat class) live behind their razorwire fences in compounds more reminiscent a Westchester hamlet than the shantytowns of nearby Soweto, where I visited a primary school where an astounding 39% of students are HIV positive. This problem was defined far more by economics than race.

The America I inhabit looks more and more like that South African scene every day. While the rich suburb of Carmel, Indiana dickers over a new 27 million dollar youth sports facility, the potholes just 6 miles south are large enough to eat a VW Rabbit.

Indianapolis found itself budgetarily unable to plow side streets this winter, but the Monon Running/Biking Trail used primarily from the wealthy “Yuppie” class found itself plowed nearly on the hour. Our self selecting society and parochial local tax structure has combined to essentially create a tale of two cities in nearly all of our major metropolitan areas.

The ties that bind Americans together are more fragile than ever before. Whereas the post-war generation saw managers and laborers living in the same neighborhoods, sending their children to the same schools, and taking in the same entertainment, the Jim Crow of today has replaced the “Coloreds Not Served” sign with one that looks like $. Racism has been replaced by economic elitism; the color of money washing away the color of skin in the new segregation of the haves and have nots.

There’s no need for a sign on the door telling who isn’t welcome when the cocktail is $14.

A quick look around the rural portions of my state will reveal a growing ghetto, made up not of blacks but of a largely white economically disenfranchised population. The HIV outbreak in Southern Indiana caused by intravenous drug use has shown that social issues are also color blind. Their problems are a mirror onto those of the Great Society Generation that saw the lower class inner-city family unit fall victim to drugs, broken homes and a lack of economic opportunity.

Discretionary handouts do not replace economic opportunity on either a moral or results basis. The problems of drug use, teen pregnancy and violence have gotten progressively worse as opportunity has become more distant. These policies served only to excuse the thriving upper classes from economically disenfranchising their lower class brethren.

As multiple generations saw economic disenfranchisement become the only reality that they’d ever known, an economic evolution took place which threatens to separate the socioeconomic classes into entirely different species.

“Us vs. Them” rhetoric of has been used to great effect in politics and it has become a self-fulfilling policy. Simply glancing at a chart of obesity and birth rate by income will show that those making under $25,000 a year are more than twice as likely to be obese, and have a birth rate 80% higher than those making more than $75,000 a year. These differences are magnitudes larger in reproduction, habitat and size than those separating the distinct African and Asian elephants.

While wealthy urban elites wring their hands at the outbreaks of violence in NYC, Baltimore, and St. Louis, it is not of some deep seeded concern but instead because they are afraid that the invisible but present boundaries of privilege will not be sufficient when the feces and fan intermingle.

The only long term solution to the problems cleaving the American dream from an ever increasing portion of the populace is the economic revitalization of these depressed areas. The economists I studied in college maintained that overall economic growth was the only outcome that mattered, but if “on paper” GDP growth only goes to fund further militarization of the police force and additional social handout programs, what did we actually gain?

Urban or rural, the root of the myriad social problems seen today is not drawn along the oft-cited lines of race. To quote our famous Cajun sage:

“It’s the economy stupid.”

Same Same but Different

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Throughout SE Asia, I probably heard the line a million times.

“Same same, but different.”

Whether it was someone trying to talk me into their restaurant or sell me “real” designer underwear at the market, the line became the English chorus in the teeming cacophony of mopeds, firecrackers and horns.

The most rewarding part of travel isn’t the places seen or the people met, it is the internal effect that it has on one’s viewpoints. It is looking at anything, old or new, and looking at it not as what you projected it to be, but as something closer to what it actually is.

I find that since getting home, I’m looking at many things that I took as routine parts of the landscape differently. The sound of walnuts and acorns rustling through limbs and dry leaves as they careen toward the ground had escaped my attention for 26 years, now it seems to be all I hear on my morning run. Perfectly spaced rows of drying corn suddenly possess a noble beauty that I had never appreciated.

Then there are the things that never bothered me, but now seem strangely absurd. Walking into a restaurant, and seeing the only healthy option to be a cheese, dressing and bacon covered “salad” is shocking after 6 months of eating little more than sliced tomatoes and cucumbers for a light meal.

The huge amount of trash that Americans generate on a daily basis, largely on the basis of overpacking everything, seems ludicrous. For instance, I bought a 2.5 inch long USB jump drive, and found myself bringing home an 8 inch by 12 inch plastic package, complete with a cardboard insert of nearly the same dimensions. All in the name of stopping shoplifters I suppose.

Also my relationship with the media has changed drastically. After a long hiatus from American news sources, I am continually shocked by the two pillars of American cable news.

Fear and consumption.

I challenge anyone to watch a news program with a discerning eye and find content that isn’t predicated on one (or both) of those pillars. From the comically fearmongering coverage of the Dallas Ebola patient, to the shamelessly consistent product placement (celebrities included) that passes as “news”, the American news media has largely ceased to serve any meaningful function within the democracy.

While traveling, I watched Anchorman 2. I loved Anchorman, but I thought that the sequel was merely a poor exercise in fill-in-the-blank jokes from the first film. However, I was intrigued by the satire of the cable news industry throughout, a point running behind the story line. Ron Burgundy becomes a late night news anchor on a 24 hour news station started by a fictional Richard Branson. After making an absurd bet that he’d beat the primetime ratings of a rival, he begins to run anything that people will watch from live police chases to cat specials, etc. His estranged wife Veronica has her once-in-a-career interview with Palestinian Yasser Arafat bumped off air by Ron’s coverage and commentary of a meaningless police chase.

In all of Ron’s blunders, he realized a fundamental truth. Viewers demand that their news be entertaining instead of informative. As I look at the state of our media now, nothing could be more obvious. Anyone able to string 6 misspelled inflammatory words together on a Twitter account can be a part of the broadcast.

We sacrificed insight for soundbites.

I decried in an earlier post the Donald Sterling debacle as being all about the wrong things, his team shouldn’t have been taken away for racist diatribes in a private phone call, it should’ve been taken away in 2003-2006 when he was being sued by tenants and the Justice Department alike for systemically racist leasing policies.

The difference was that generating outrage in the 2003-2006 period would’ve taken actual journalism, whereas a 10 second soundbite with that most dreaded of racial epithets generated more outrage than 100 well-researched articles would have.

There are countless things one learns during real travel, both about yourself and the world. The most impactful lesson will always be the learned ability to look at something for what it is, as opposed to through the societal glasses you’ve always worn.

 

Elevating My Ideals

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Turns out the toughest part of traveling is coming home. I’ve been back in the States for just about a week now, and as wonderful as it has been to hug my mom, and hold some of my dearest friends’ baby, there is an unsettling feeling to being…settled.

I wanted to slip back even momentarily into my travels, so I sat down and watched Elevate, an ESPN documentary about SEED Academy. Having been a part of the organization for nearly 3 years, it was almost criminal that I hadn’t watched it yet. The documentary follows 4 of our alumni from the campus at Thies through their careers in prep school, before showing where they ended up going to college.

I had the opportunity to hang out with one of the 4 alums, Dethie Fall, when I was in Senegal. Dethie is a character in a half. Now a grad assistant for Grand Canyon State, he parlayed height and some limited basketball skills into a great education. He’s now pursuing his MBA and will be bringing a team entirely capable of beating IU to Bloomington in December.

I will be there, and I will almost definitely be the biggest Grand Canyon State fan in Assembly Hall.

Seeing Dethie as a quiet and shy 17 year old in the film had me laughing, because in the time I’ve spent with him, I wasn’t sure he had the physical ability to be quiet. He’s always cracking jokes, or teaching Noah and I the basics of picking up Senegalese women in their native Waloof.

Shy is the last adjective anyone would use to describe Dethie today, but he’s used his passion for people to be one of SEED’s greatest ambassadors.

Seeing that transformation in reverse has really re-energized me in my efforts with SEED. After gaining a first hand view of what we’re trying to accomplish in a gym that wouldn’t be the 15th nicest in my county of 40,000 people, I was shocked at how our organization has achieved so much with so little in the way of resources.

Seeing the founder, Amadou Fall, deliver heartfelt speeches to the kids about taking advantage of the opportunities in front of them was an emotional tug on this stoic. Amadou hit the proverbial lottery when some Peace Corps volunteers helped him get a scholarship to the University of DC, where he went on to graduate Magna Cum Laude in Biology, an achievement far outstripping any on the court.

He turned around and worked to ensure that the next generation of his countrymen would have opportunities to do the same, to create a program which allowed hard work to determine opportunity, not sheer luck.

The organization he founded has generated nearly 6 million dollars in scholarships for 95 alumni over the past 12 years, and with our current efforts and expansion, that number should increase exponentially over the next 5 years.

No longer merely an elite educational academy for a handpicked few, we are reaching nearly 200 boys and girls a year in our Thies programs, and we’ve expanded our total footprint to nearly 2000 with a partnership with USAID and the NBA’s Live, Learn and Play program.

I was blessed to get a random introduction to the Executive Directors of SEED, Noah Levine and Romola Ratnam, who put my inherent Indiana passion for basketball (at least I’ve got passion because God knows I never had a jumpshot)  to work for an organization that needs both funding and manpower to really reach the next level.

Positive change doesn’t happen in the world overnight. Turns out, magic wands are only in Harry Potter. It takes the dedication of men and women who believe that they can make a difference. It is setting up container shipments, chasing down sponsorships, pouring over stretched budgets, and coaching scared 16 year olds through visa interviews.

Then you’ve got to wake up and do it all again next week.

I sat on the sidelines for too long, content to think that if I took care of myself, that the rest of the world would fall into place. That’s not how it works. Communities thrive on the willing sacrifice of others, whether it means donating your time to an after-school program, or taking a world class education and working for peanuts for a cause that you truly believe in.

Community starts next door, but in a world of ever increasing connectedness, it spans oceans as well.

I’m glad that my worldview was shaken on this trip, and I’m glad that I’ve been re-energized to try to make a difference in the lives of people who truly deserve it.

If you can’t convince the man in the mirror to put forth the effort, why do you think that someone else will?

The End of the Beginning

/ chrismoorman13 / 3 Comments

There are some things in life that can’t be forced. Reflective writing and bowel movements find themselves at the top of that list for me, but that very well might be more a manifestation of my last week than anything.

I am home. The Conquest has returned to the States.

I’ve been trying to talk myself into writing some sort of a concluductory post since Monday. I had 27 hours in flight to think about it, but I avoided my computer the whole time. I had a bus ride, a few quiet hours here and there, and finally a 4 hour staring match with a blank sheet of paper.

I just never could figure out how to force it.

Then, as most great ideas do, it came to me in the midst of a hot shower (shower temperature and creative output have a correlation nearing 100% for me.)

This post wasn’t meant to be a conclusion or a hasty recap of the last 6 months, it was yet another jumping off point.

The Conquest hasn’t ended, it has merely entered a new phase. Every idea has a life cycle, whether a business, a diet, a relationship or evening plans. There is the exciting “eureka moment,” there is the planning stage, there is the long (sometimes arduous) process of execution, and then there is always the inevitable evolution.

That’s what the Conquest is going through now.

I struggled all week about “doing the end justice” and pressuring myself to make this the best piece that I’ve written the whole time. It has driven my digestive system into a dither, but absolutely nothing had appeared on a page.

I wanted there to be some great takeaway, something gained from the last 6 months that I could point to and convince myself (and others) that “see, I knew I’d find my million dollar idea out there somewhere.”

Truth is, I didn’t even find myself. If anything, I now have a more ambiguous sense of self than I ever have.

And then I realized it.

No greater treasure will man ever find.

**********

Surrounded by a sensory overload of smells, noise, colors and people, I found a life without distractions.

The difference between social interaction and social media regained a clarity lost in the digital din. Shared meals showed why nearly every society makes hospitality and “the breaking of bread” a cornerstone virtue. I got to experience the shared attributes of humanity, those which transcend language, culture, politics or any of the other “higher forms” of civilization, to reveal the most basic of human necessities.

I found in the midst of abject poverty, the existential truth in Mark Twain’s words, “Comparison IS the death of joy.”

I saw all the complications of life slip away, if even only briefly. We are born, we love and we die. The only difference is our reaction to these intractable truths.

That slavery will exist always in some iteration is an inviolable truth of the human condition. The absence of physical chains hasn’t ended slavery any more than a cloudy night ends the moon. Slavery to opinion, to possessions, and to expectations are chains more powerful than iron.

The cruelest forms of slavery will always be self-inflicted.

I found that there is much more that unites people than divides. I saw, that outside of our protected zones of comfort, people will seek to connect rather than exclude. However, when the status quo becomes its own self-evident good, divisions both natural and manmade will seek to separate each from their neighbor.

I found sustainable living in a place where my bank account dropped daily.

The world showed me to be a fool time and time again, but acknowledgement of my ignorance was a comfort in itself. I found that those who think they know the most are always the least likely to learn, and I impolitely recused myself from membership in that self-satisfied group.

I found that a fight between two friends willing to listen to one another is one of the greatest tools for growth that man will ever find. I also found that some friendships are less permanent than we would hope, but that an end does not define the whole.

I saw the human condition at its most vulnerable, and witnessed the strength that it takes to be weak. Death comes for us all, regardless of color, income or location.

Fear only diminishes each breath that remains.

Like Cassandra foreseeing the destruction of Troy, I stood in the midst of the jungles of Laos with tears in my eyes that this too would someday fall victim to the unstoppable force of consumerism, a natural treasure sold piecemeal as presswood Ikea TV stands and glossy paper advertisements.

The dangers of confusing technical expertise with wisdom became clearer and clearer. Just as a man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail, so too does technical expertise lack the vision to see the unintended consequences of a “solution.”

As the West encroaches further and further into societies which grew up Darwinistically different values to our own, we will find ourselves trying to repair and improve mechanisms that we truly do not understand. Just as we have moved further from the values of our forefathers, cocksure in our belief that newer, bigger, and faster are self-evident goods, so to will we unintentionally destroy that which has bound vibrant communities together for centuries.

The list of observations I made could go on for days, but they all lead to the same inexorable conclusion. For all the knowledge that my travels afforded me, they merely showed how woefully insufficient the framework I use to cobble it together truly is. Only by acknowledging our own stunning ignorance can any of us hope to truly learn, and only by questioning those “truths” we’ve held as absolute can we ever be sure of anything at all.

Even as the world becomes interconnected at an ever increasing pace, it appears to me that individuals are retreating further and further into our own rigid beliefs. This would seem, to a mildly logical man, to be two opposing forces eventually destined for direct conflict. Will people simply pop their heads out of the foxhole after the battle occurs and acknowledge the “truth” as told by the victors?

History doesn’t seem to think so, although through most of human history, we didn’t encourage our best thinkers to become “excellent sheep.”

I hope to have avoided that comfortable affliction.

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The Conquest gave me what all great conquests will, the confidence to chase a new horizon.

I didn’t come back with a multi-million dollar idea and I didn’t come back with a groundbreaking novel in the can. I didn’t bring home the woman of my dreams (even if I now know a few locations where she might be hiding.)

I made some of the best friends I could ask for. I saw a side of myself that I didn’t think existed. I freed myself from the endless barrage of manipulated messages, both commercial and from a fear-inducing media, and the world I found turned out to be a safer and more wonderful place than I could’ve possibly imagined.

I saw that there are really a million ways to die, and that to live in fear of any of them is a fool’s errand. I made peace with a few deaths that I hadn’t properly processed, and I realized through bitter tears on an empty Thai beach, that you can say a proper goodbye to a loved one without a body or a suit.

I found friendships can be deeper after 3 days than some can after 10 years, and I saw the power of the human spirit in overcoming adversity.

I saw the good in man that I thought that I’d forgotten, and I saw some of the forgotten faceless in places that won’t ever get talked about on the news.

The man in the mirror looks back at me differently today.

He smiles a lot more. He reminded me that he’s the only one in this life that will take every step with me, and that if I don’t make peace with him, what the hell chance to I have with the rest of it. He showed me that I can be as happy in a bunk bed as I can in a multi-million dollar house, and that sometimes the best look we’ve got has a few tears running down our face.

I missed many things while I was gone. I missed a parcel of babies being born, and the weddings of some of my dearest and oldest friends.

Nothing is without cost, yet another universal truth that I uncovered.

The former commodity trader found that there are only two commodities that really matter.

Love and time.

As I returned home and picked up the 2 month old daughter of two of my best friends, I realized that instantly. Even if that were the only thing the Conquest had taught me, it would’ve been enough.

Thankfully it taught me so much more.

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Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to follow my blog. The support that I’ve gotten from friends, family and total strangers who happened accidentally wandered on has been stunning and humbling.

I hope you enjoyed reading about it a tenth as much as I enjoyed living it. As I re-integrate back into “reality”, there will be more posts of reflection about some of the things I’ve seen and done. There will also be some thoughts on life back in the Western world as I re-acclimate myself to a reality that was once the only one I’d ever known.

If I can offer any advice on travel, the first piece is “Do it.” Anything more specific, please reach out to chrismoorman13@gmail.com and I’d be more than happy to offer tips or advice on any of the places I’ve been, or backpacking in general. We were all blessed with a wide and wonderful world on which to live, and it is a true shame to relegate ourselves to only the small corners where we were born.

Life as a hastily planned adventure works. Just poke around my ramblings and musings on this page if you need proof.