Sunday in Gastein!

Life is good now but I feel caught between two worlds – my old life in Tallahassee and my new life in Ifrane.  There is so much that I can’t anticipate about Morocco since I have never been there.  It does not seem quite real yet.  Being in Germany and Austria gives me a taste of what Morocco might be like, but in may ways the culture here and in the US are very similar.  One similarity between here and Morocco is not being able to communicate effectively – I think this will be my biggest challenge and the source of my greatest frustration.  It’s like being a lost child (actually a lost idiot-child) who is dependent on the patience and kindness of strangers.  I know I can depend on Doris to smooth the path for me but I need to break that habit fast.  Otherwise, I will never be able to function independently and will become even more frustrated and isolated within a society that I don’t know and can’t understand. In order to make the “otherness” of Morocco “familiar” I need to immerse myself in Moroccan life, culture and language as quickly as I can.  I can’t allow myself to be a “fearful child” but I must be a “fearless and curious child” who is eager to seize every new experience – both the easy and the difficult.  I need to roll with the punches; and, in the best JuBu style, if I accept that life is full of ups and downs, successes and failures, joys and sorrows and it’s all part of the learning process, then I will survive and thrive.  If I don’t attach to the emotion of the moment, I can experience the reality of each moment and learn something new and accept that life is always a cycle of change from good to bad and from bad to good – an endless cycle of life experiences with opportunities for learning and change.   Or in hippie-speak – go with the flow dude!  I often think of what David Levenson, a friend and former professor, once told me – we learn more from our mistakes than our successes.  If that’s so, though, I must be smarter than I think I am – actually I must be a genius. 

It’s really amazing at 62 to be on this grand adventure with Doris.  Thank you Doris- without you this would never have happened.  I know that as long as I hang with you my life will be interesting. 

It’s lazy Sunday in Bad Hofgastein, we may take a hike to a waterfall later today or go sun at the lake.  But, who knows, we are on vacation.  I just checked in on Doris to let her know that I’m trekking to town for a wi-fi fix.  She is watching an hour long, commercial-free show on German TV where all they do is discuss books and this is the second such show she has watched this morning - only in Germany but never in America.  It makes TV worth watching.  I have left the intellectual wasteland of America and I am now in the intellectual Promised Land where education, ideas and culture are valued.

As I send this, I am sitting in the square in Bad Hofgastein, listening to the bells ring at the Catholic Church.  People as wandering through the square and I can hear the patrons at the coffee shop discussing whatever of their lives they find interesting at this moment.  The conversations are often punctuated with  laughter.   There is a languid sweetness to life here.  The sun is warm, the air is cool and a gentle breeze rustles through the leaves.