What I love most about living in Thailand (besides blistering hot peppers, blissful foot massages, and basement scorpions)
Personal update from Chiang Mai
This is the latest of many personal dispatches on culture, healing, and spirituality from a dual Canadian-American living in Thailand. Find popular free essays here and access to the rest of Sober Soulful (including the Sobriety Series) by upgrading here:
The other evening at dusk, walking home from the outdoor market with bags full of khao soi, fresh orange juice, and Thai desserts, I realized something that had been forming in my mind for weeks.
What I love—what I really, really love—about living in Thailand is the process of becoming fluent in the language, the society, the culture. I love walking through my days in a perpetual state of not-knowing and unknowing and learning and curiosity and wonder. I love looking around and seeing words that I can’t yet read. I love looking around and seeing so much happening that I still don’t understand. And hearing things I still can’t decipher. But then I do catch a word here and there. And I do start to figure things out, slowly, with close attention.
And each new discovery, each point of recognition, each new pattern I unravel brings absolute delight. A delight only matched by that sparked by all that’s left to unravel and discover and learn. A delight that exists because I’m conscious of and curious about the mystery surrounding us.
This, more than any other reason—even more than financial relief and easy access to holistic healthcare—is why I feel most at ease and most alive and most at home living in a country that’s still foreign to me. This is what brought me to Thailand and China and Egypt and Palestine and Lebanon and Syria and Ethiopia and Mongolia in my twenties. This is what brought me back to Thailand now, in the final year of my forties.
It’s taken too long to get back to this. What a relief to get back to this. I don’t plan on giving it up again anytime soon.
And of course we can find this sense of mystery and newness and wonder anywhere we live. And of course we don’t need to stray from where we were born to find it.
Except, I think I did. At least to find it at this intensity and with this always-on immediacy. For me, life is bigger this way—especially since I spend so much of my days online. Because despite rejecting internet echo chambers, despite refusing to wall myself up in narrative enclaves, life online can only ever be as big as our screen. It can only ever be wholly constructed. It can only ever exist in a state of separation from the body, the breath, from life itself.
That’s what I love most about living in Thailand. I don’t need to try hard to escape the algorithm or to remember the ridiculousness of the algorithm. I don’t need to try hard to reconnect to what’s real, to remember the mystery, to remember our humanity and my humanity and that the world’s a big, beautiful place and none of us knows much of anything.
Below, a few updates and lighter musings, including:
The flood situation (moving back home, neighborhood clean up, scorpion invasion!)
The glorious gift of foot massages (and being able to afford them regularly)
Addiction to raw, blistering hot peppers (can attest, it’s a thing)
