The lights are dim, but the soothing glow of Air Canada’s hundreds of video screens illuminate the faces of the weary travelers all around me. Instructions are relayed over the loud speaker in languages reflecting the current occupancy. A female voice first reminds the passengers to strictly adhere to the laws of the buckle seatbelt and no smoking glyphs immortalized in a sunset of orange and red. The familiar English message comes to an end before a string of French floats along putting a romantic sheen on what must be the same demand. The wholly unrecognizable sing song of Japanese syllables that follows and finishes the crew’s announcements coerces a recollection of another fashion; we have just glided past Palin’s coast and are now a speck in the sky over international waters. The darkness of the cabin envelopes me in a cocoon where my thoughts are free to wander wherever they may. I have tried over and again to explain the manner in which my brain has been flipping and careening between past, present and future but to no avail. My mind is inebriated with possibility.
Every decision I make in the next eleven months will have far reaching, unforeseen consequences all coming with their positives and negatives. Last night, I pulled on my football cleats for the first time since our senior season was cut short. Clods of turf were still molded onto the heels and I was taken with the crazy notion that I would walk on at Waseda to wreck house with a bunch of Japanese guys. Now however, my sights are set on the more realistic venture of dabbling in some Far East rugby… more on that later. Only God knows where the decision to actually pack the things will lead me in the next couple months. Each choice has been and will continue to be a pebble falling into the pool that is my life. Rewind a few months to the dropping of the stone that was my application for home stay while studying abroad. I watched with bated breath as time passed and my application slowly tumbled and rotated until I was evaluated, given a family and sent the email containing everything Waseda deemed necessary for me to know. That rock has finally hit the water and the first ripples of location and family information have already been utterly unexpected. I live a paltry twenty minute walk from campus with two seventy year old Japanese seniors who do not speak English. Talk about waves.
Back up a little further to my decision to take Japanese. The majority of American students take mandatory language classes for at least some of their high school careers. To those of you that muddled through or were even exceptionally talented in Spanish or French, how often do you take a retrospective look and find that new languages impacted your lives? I’m not talking about the stunning realization that street names mean something (Las Gallinas, The Embarcadero, Nova Albion Way) that I came to as well in my learning Spanish. Rather were you clipped by a blow so hard that your life came off of its tracks as mine did? Perhaps that is the wrong phrasing. Life is not on tracks, there is no plan. Let me try again, please. Have you ever been blindsided by something, anything to the point where that smack across your face freed you from where you thought you were going? That is what my choice to learn Japanese did for and to me. I am in this winged contraption with a beautiful woman beside me, leaving my homeland for a year and completely unsure of my future simply because when I was accepted to Boston College the thought struck me: “I like anime, I should take Japanese.”
The more I reflect on the causes of the continuously shifting nature of my future the happier I become. I am filled with joy that I finally do not know what lays two weeks down the road let alone two months or a year. There is no fun in knowing exactly where your going. Do not move, however, without purpose. There is a staggeringly vast difference between having no idea where you will be in a little while and being lost now.
4 hours ‘till we land.
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