My time to leave for North Carolina was soon approaching. I was looking for jobs, and would go to the college library to work on applications during the day. One of the afternoons when I came home Chris and Isabel were folding clothes. Isabel asked me about my job interview. Chris asked where exactly I was going. Then we spent a few minutes trying to figure out which is the capital of North Carolina.
At some point Chris said that one day he would also like to visit some places in the world. But, he continued, even though he hadn’t been to too many places, he felt comfortable being in a city and being out in the woods. That, in a way, was enough.
“It’s just like you,” he looked at me, “being able to communicate with many people using different languages.”
But it’s not just about the language. The language is just a door; only the heart gets at the real thing. In his words, it’s not about speaking with people, but being with them.
Then he started this story of living for a few months in Finland many years ago. While staying at the house of a Finn, he worked for him in the field as a way to pay back. Once, during a busy season, he cut his finger and couldn’t work anymore. Anxious about not being able to help, the next day he found a glove and started picking leaves again. The host, on seeing him working like that, told him to stop immediately, almost with anger. Chris tried to explain, and that man responded, in his broken English, his third language, “It is not what you do. It is who you are.”
“But don’t you feel the pressure to prove who you are,” I asked, “especially in front of people who don’t know you yet?” In China, as Confucius and our dear parents taught us all our life, do something, instead of saying it. Action is important. Then the question comes to how to find the balance between being and doing.
“No matter you do, do, do, or you be, be, be,” Chris said, “you have to be content with that. Otherwise it’s hard to live with yourself. The world needs the do-ers and the be-ers, but definitely need more of those that are content with their doing and being.”
Nice ideas are always easier to hear than to do. That afternoon I had just talked with a friend about what to do once I got to North Carolina. Not so much about what to do for myself but what to do with the person I was going there for. Later Isabel left home to see her friend. I sat on the couch while Chris was getting ready to do some work at the table. Unable to shut my mind off from the conversation with my friend, I asked Chris, what I should do when I got to North Carolina, how I should initiate the conversation with that person.
As always he responded in his forester’s manner, wise and roundabout as if walking in the woods. By the end he didn’t give me a direct answer, but he said, if one day Amy decided to leave, as much committed to each other as they were now, he would, though sad, let her go.
“If a cocoon becomes a butterfly, you can’t put it in your cage anymore.”
I knew. A butterfly is beautiful because it can fly.
“But the thing is,” I explained, “I don’t know whether it wants to become a butterfly or not… Well, all I’m trying to say is that if he’s still…”
I gave up justifying my confusion, but instead I asked, putting it more simply, if I should call that person when I arrived in the city, or just show up in front of his door, or if I should let him know now.
Chris thought for a few seconds and answered, “It depends on how the relationship once was.”
“What do you mean?”
“If there was some depth in it, then the place doesn’t matter.”
“Depth? But there might be depth on one side and is completely shallow on the other!”
"That’s right, and you can never know what it is for the other person. You can think you know, believe you know, but you never know. And there were things I believed I knew about myself, which turned out to be not true.”
I thought I had just heard the answer that I wanted to hear throughout the past few months. People had been telling me what was the polite thing to do, the wise thing to do, for him or for myself, but the answer was in me.
“A lot of times,” Chris continued, “we try to find the best moment, the best place, but we can’t. And it’s good to feel that uncertainty, because you will feel that again and again. The important thing is to learn to live with that uncertainty, to be okay with it. When you can be okay with not knowing, you will become braver.”
I pondered on his words, those familiar, nice-sounding concepts that seemed utterly impossible to put into actual practice.
“And you should also think,” he said, “that you are starting a new journey. That person may be joining you for part of it. Then he is lucky, because you have a lot to offer. Or it can be his loss.”
“It definitely is!” I burst out with a smile.
He put up a thumb and laughed, and said, “We don’t need to talk more.”
But he still told me, in the end, to be ready to accept what was true was not true anymore.
I accepted. I did.
Did I?
