Labor Day Weekend
So I just had a wonderful weekend. Starting out by getting 4 jumps in (and passing all 4 on the first try!) on Saturday, and then extending into 3 days of friends, food, drink, and debauchery. While the wild events of the weekend are certainly worth chronicling in greater detail (and I intend to do just that in another post), the first thing that needs to be addressed was a discovery made this weekend about myself and people in general.
This weekend consisted of me hanging out with 9 other Serbian folks (and a Scot to boot) in a rented house on the beach. Great fun to be had throughout to be sure. But something unexpected happened. The weekend didn’t suck, and it felt extremely nice and relaxing and weird at the same time. It felt weird because I hardly ever have a weekend like that. I’ve had long weekends with friends before, but they’ve been very different. I think what was different here was that the house was filled with people who shared the same “village” mentality that I have and very few, if any, Americans possess.
What it comes down to is the world not revolving around you. The world revolves around something that you are a part of, but not you as an individual. The fierce individualism that has made the US such a great world power has also greatly eroded the social customs of the people who live here. There are expressions like “it takes a village to raise a child” that are known in the US, but they’re never understood. They’re usually just quaint expressions picked up from some far-off tribal society. But these customs are what have kept people surviving for thousands of years. And, for me at least, there’s just something extremely calming about being immersed in the experience.
I have layers and layers of “filters” in my mind that take all of the experiences of the world and sort them and massage them before delivering them to my consciousness so that I can deal with them in an appropriate manner. This type of experience, however, just bypasses all of those filters. There’s no thought of any sort involved. It’s a wonderful example of me being in tune with the world around which so rarely happens in day to day life. And it is oh, so relaxing.
happy
