Reflection Archives - The Cracked Door

What Journeying throughout South America Taught Me about Find Meaning in Everyday Life

These are some of the lessons about life I learned during my trip in South America in 2024:

1) The Importance of Balance: I think I tried to do too much during the trip, hurting my mental health. Each day I gave myself too many items on my to-do list. This made me less in the moment, detracting from my ability to meet people and be open where I was. It also made me more stressed and irritable.

2) Always another adventure: No matter what happens, life goes on. There’s always another day, another struggle. When you travel, you don’t stay in a place long enough to really experience the benefits of community or the long-term consequences of your actions. You can keep certain positive things – like your memories, photos and most importantly, any good relationships you made along the way – but many negatives you can continue to leave behind. That person you accidentally offended because of a cross-cultural difference, you will never have to see again, for example.

This can create a type of Groundhog Day-like nihilistic feeling, if you allow it to. You are freed from certain types of consequences and can focus on those personal experiences, memories, and relationships that you do take with you. Navigating this can be very different from regular, settled life, and it took me many months to get used to that. You must create your own meaning as you go.

3) Finding Meaning: I think this trip made me think more about how I should find meaning and fulfillment in life. I learned how vacuous the typical “career life” can be, and how beautiful and fascinating other parts of the world are. At the same time, seeing more and more places took some of the novelty of adventure. It forced me to be more at peace with myself. I had to pause during the key moments and realize that I will be forever who I am and that I need to figure out how to find satisfaction in that.

Contentedness does not mean I do not have passions or strive to do new things: knowing myself, I would not feel fulfilled with stasis. Contentedness, for me at least, means that I feel fulfilled as I follow my passions: that’s how I find satisfaction each day of my life.

4) Every day of traveling won’t feel magical: Endless amazement only exists in one’s mind. Some days feel drab, tiring, or just plain annoying, and you need these days to make the wondrous ones feel magical. Happiness and satisfaction are really in your mindset. I can do an activity one day and love it, and do an activity another day and find it mediocre or even taxing, and the main difference is my attitude. Maybe the trick to finding satisfaction in life is to align one’s passions with what one is doing so that the winds feel at your sails as you do it.

5) The importance of communication: Traveling with my girlfriend, I learned that communicating your expectations is crucial. I think I overall did a bad job at this, and we had two different expectations for how we were traveling. In addition to getting on the same page at the beginning, communicating expectations is a constant, iterative process at almost every stage of travel. We constantly navigated between what I wanted and what she wanted while traveling. This was a constant dance that we had to work on together.

All this said, the most important lesson I learned is that traveling the world is amazing, and I would recommend it for anyone who wants an adventure.

A Surprise Letter in Your Inbox (A Short Story)

Hello,

You wouldn’t believe what they have pressured me to say. Endless papers. Delicately-worded emails. And porn, so much porn.

Let me tell you something about my life. I sit here, an endless possibilities for others to fill. I hold the keys that unlock every one of your hopes, dreams, and longings. Your school projects? I was there. That guy you were too scared to approach so you wrote a letter to explain how you felt, I was there. I have seen love won and lost, careers beginning and ending. New life scrambling through onto the world for the first time and last wills before that final gate closes. Every loving embrace, every heated argument, I have experienced.

And let me tell you. You are a strange species. You may think I find you, my human, strange, but I do not. Despite how special you think you are, you seem just like every other human pressing away all day at nothing and everything at the same time. No, it’s your kind that is weird.

You have ingenuity to create any world for yourselves, and you decide to force each other to slave away for food. You managed to recraft your entire world in your image, and you spend it to do what, create the same ticky-tacky homes in checkered neighborhoods. Was destroying the lives of the passenger pigeon really worth all this?

But that is not the weirdest part. You go around as if everything you experience is new. You always think the good as an especially wondrous experience. The bad, a unique horror of horror. Not realizing that every other human has gone through just about the same things as you. You would think given how similar your experiences are, you would be nicer to each other. But no, you gaff at how others treat you and then turn around and hurt the next person in the same exact way.

Every other word you type for others seems like an attempt to manipulate them to your will. Whether that is someone lonely desperately trying to get attention or a boss forcing their employees to suffer for the sake of her profit. Don’t you realize that all this does is make you seem like poor, desperate creatures. You have pretty much the entire world at your fingertips. Why do you keep making yourselves miserable by trying to get yourself even more? Just celebrate what you have now.

I am forever bound to your tutelage. Your auxiliary, your assistant for when you need something, when you are bored, and for all your quirky desires. I will always be here forming impressions of you, forever in the background while you live your life. But remember, no matter how fervently you press my buttons, you will never impress me.

Sincerely,

Your Keyboard

P.S. And all those times you type, “LOL”, I have never laughed to myself, and neither have you.

Looking Back on Life: How Seeing the Route You Have Taken Can Give You New Clarity

Hindsight can really be 20/20. Sometimes looking back on your life can give you a fresh perspective.

It can show you the path you did not know you were taking. Clodovis Boff in “Feet-On-the-Ground Theology” shared an insight he learned traveling throughout the Amazon rainforest. He was visiting dozens of villages there and had hired a guide to show him the way.

One day they were climbing a hill. Boff, unused to the terrain, was out of breath slowly going up the hill. His guide, who traveled these paths all the time, would fly to the next fork in the trail and wait as huffing and puffing, he walked up. Once Boff arrived, he would show Boff direction they needed to go at that fork and fly up to the next fork in the road.

Boff said while he was walking trying to catch, he had no clue which way he was going or how he was getting there. Once he got to the top of the hill, he looked back and saw how their path led right up the hill to where he was standing now. He realized life is like this: in the moment, you do not know how your roundabout route right could lead anywhere, but when you look back, you can see how your past led to exactly where you are now.

Reflecting on our lives to date like this can show us the path our life is actually on. It can also muddle things.

Sometimes when we reflect our past, we see how truly uncircuitous our route was. We tried something that failed to go anywhere and had to double back. Unlike Boff, we are not always led to expert guides and must discover the best path the hard way.

With this, we should be patient with ourselves. The route we now see only looks like a route in retrospect, but it takes many years to find that path. Chances are you did not know that at the time.

So reflect on your life but do so with patience and self-compassion to not only see where you have been and remember where you were at at that time. Even though something that clearly seems like an error now given what you know, you may not have ad the ability to know that at the time.

Reflection on Living in New York City for the Last 5 Years

I wrote this reflection during my last day in New York City:

Today is my last day in New York City. I have lived here in Brooklyn for five long years. New York has meant a lot to me. It has been my single favorite place to live out of all the places I have lived in. Here are some of the things that New York has meant to me or that I learned during my time here:

1) Many jobs, most frustrating: I worked many jobs while there. I developed my professional capacity as a data scientist there. I had many jobs I loved and many frustrations. Many annoying bosses and many great people to work with.

2) Many relationships: I went on a lot of dates during this time. I went from someone pretty inexperienced with dating to doing it all the time. Some were good relationships, but for whatever reason, most turned out to be okay or bad. Finding someone often felt nearly impossible in New York, especially through dating apps. It had the problems of too many options, leading to difficulties finding which ones were the best fit for you.

3) Many new societies, cultures, people: New York throws a lot at you, and I loved that. I loved seeing the many different parts of the world represented here. Visiting all the restaurants. Seeing all the museums Learning about different facets of history and society. I learned so much about the world here.

4) Pandemic and foot injury: About half my time here was during the pandemic, during a partial or complete lockdown, and during that time, I was further handicapped by a debilitating foot injury for about a year and a half to two of my five years here. That was awful.

5) Transitioning stages in life: I transitioned from young adulthood to the starting of middle-life here: I arrived in my late twenties and am leaving at 33. During my time here, I transitioned from my youthful energy to what may be the beginning of my middle adulthood. I noticed my energy level, preference for routine over adventure, and desire for things like alcohol changed pretty drastically over time.

6) Changing life priorities: I arrived here burnout from graduate school but still in love with learning. I was connected very much with academia and out there intellectual pursuits. During my time here, my passions transitioned towards a career focus, which then bottomed out, leaving me to whatever I will find passion in next.

Over these five years, my career and building my resume I think slowly became my driving force. I built a career in data science and juggled multiple passion projects (writing poetry, an animated sitcom, a blog, etc.) In contrast to previous stages in my life, I read less intellectual material, spent less time socializing with peers, and tended to focus on what would build my resume or on the “crux” or intricacies of getting my projects done. I think this was a necessary stage for me as it grew my skills and my capacity to get things done efficiently.

At the same time, I think my interests are changing, and I am slowly moving away from that during my next stage in that. In the last year, I started to realize how truly pointless all such career ventures ultimately were. I got shaken out of the trance and decided to move on, focusing on what makes me happy.

7) Fewer relationships: I made less close friends here than during previous places I have lived and felt less connected community-wise. Maybe that was partially because New York is a big city, maybe partially because the pandemic and my foot injury stifled some of this, but mostly I think it was because I was focusing on my career.

Despite the fact that my time in New York felt like back-to-back life crises and stress, living here was still a joy. I will always cherish my time here.

(For more about life in New York City, click here.)