From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Ridiculous

To hear my name called just before boarding is a little disconcerting.  I am certain it will be about a problem with my luggage or something to do with my ticket.  Instead, I am told that there's been an overbooking in Economy class and I have been bumped up to Business class.  Not kidding!  This has never happened to me before.  Before this I have always tried not to pay too much attention to all those roomy, lie-flat luxury chairs as I make my way past them to the 3 square feet of space that will be my existence for the next 14 hours of just the first flight.

Now one of those luxury spots is mine!  I am almost giddy as I board, but try to look like this is all so normal for me as I settle in.  Try not to gasp at the leg room, the little cubbies for storage, the automatic chairs that - yes! - go ALL THE WAY FLAT for sleeping!  When they come by to take our lunch and dinner orders from the menu (yes, the menu!) I am polite and nonchalant, and hope I don't look too surprised by being asked how I want my steak done, and then the appetizer, full salad, main dish, palate cleanser (not kidding) and dessert.  Almost makes me wish I drank wine, the way the attendant comes by with a selection in this fancy basket over his arm.  Am I even on the same airplane as those poor folks back there peeling off the aluminum foil?

I sleep.  Four hours in one stint, I sleep!  And I read, and I watch a movie, and I have my feet up almost the whole time, because the chairs do that here.

And it's wonderful.  My exhaustion from, well let's be honest, from whole crazy spun out year that it was, gets a bit of a push back.  This is a gift.  I embrace the blessing.

But truth be told, and without me really knowing it yet, it only reinforces something that will be a launching theme for this particular visit to Thailand, here right at the beginning of 2017; the ridiculosity of status.

Yes, I know ridiculosity isn't a word.  There's a red squiggly line under it as I type it out.  But it's the word I use to describe how I squirm in this sense of having humans beings separated into classes.

Don't get me wrong.  I know how this works.  You pay for what you get, and being treated like a Business Class passenger comes with that price tag.  But something inside of me isn't completely okay with it all.  Because I AM on the same plane as those folks back there with the swollen ankles and numb bottoms.  That's actually where I SHOULD be since that's all I paid for.  But some random choice not of my own earning put me where I am, which I would not have paid for, because there are much better things to do with my money than make me comfortable.  And I am no different than any other person on that plane, not in terms of importance anyways.

I will remember the ridiculosity of the linen napkins and attention to fine details, and how clean and roomy and comfortable it all was a few days later, when I make my way treacherously down an uneven and dangerously steep set of stairs in the middle of the night to make my way to an outhouse that hardly qualifies as fit for human use.  That's where the sublime comes in.


Sublime

I didn't know I could feel this chilled in Thailand, but here I am getting up as close as I can to the fire to stay warm.  I have on all the clothes I brought, more or less, but my backside is facing away, so I contort myself a little on the low wooden stool I've been given, in order to more evenly roast myself.  Like a marshmallow, I try to explain, but some of the people around the fire with me don't know what a marshmallow is.  True thing.

I'm not sure who some of them are.  They have just strolled past and have been invited to join.  That's what you do here, this far up the mountain.  About 300 people live clustered in this village that somehow exists this far from what I have previously believed were necessities.  There's plumbing of sorts, and electricity strung on wires that an electrician relative of mine would suggest was installed by a company called "Nightmare Electric".   But these are huts really.  Wooden or bamboo or a combination of both, with livestock underneath and open fires in a pit inside.  Only right now we are outside, with neighbours who have dropped by.

There's laughing, and talking.  The language is Karen, not Thai, although I discover that they know Thai and I can communicate just a little bit.  Not enough to translate 'marshmallow' but enough to explain that Canada is very cold right now with lots of snow.  And I show them pictures on my phone and they gasp.  And they ask about schools and hospitals and where do all the poor people live?  And we have something of a political conversation, such as it can be when not just the language but the way of life is oh so different that it's kind of hard to explain.

I realize that my description is perhaps giving an impression that everything is perfect where I come from.  So I make an observation.

Lots of people in Canada are alone and sad, I say.  Most of us are way too busy.  We don't just drop in on our neighbours like this.  We all have so much to do.  Or, for other reasons,  we just stay at home in our own houses, and sometimes we don't even know the people who live right beside us.

They are astonished.  And even to me, sitting here beside a communal fire, on a hillside oh so far away from home, it seems ridiculous.  In the midst of this sublime, slow, totally people-oriented, we'-re-all-in-this-together culture, suddenly, the way I live just seems weird.

My meal was prepared over that same fire earlier.  Ate with my fingers, dipping into a common bowl, not entirely sure what it was I was eating.  I was offered something that looked like it was stuffed into an intestine or might perhaps been cooked snake, I wasn't sure which.  And I tried some.  No one asked me how I wanted my steak done for that meal.

There will be other things that will provide the ridiculous/sublime contrast in the days to come.  But for right now, warming myself by this fire, this, this just seems to be more of the sublime part of the continuum.

And, honestly, you can't imagine how many stars you can see when you're this far up the mountain!