Dear Friends,
The Up Series is a British documentary series that for the last 49 years has tracked the lives of a group of children every seven years as they have aged. It is placed 26th in a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute. The first show in 1964 showed the fourteen children at the age of seven. They had intentionally been selected from both rich and poor backgrounds, with the underlying sociological assumption that class structure was so strong that a person’s life path would be set at birth. Over the last 49 years this has largely been borne out.
I watched the latest instalment of the series, broadcast last Saturday morning, with my 92 year old grandmother who has advanced pancreatic cancer. Do you think she was interested in the show? Personally I found it hard to watch the participants tell their life story over the last seven years and not start thinking of mine own. As creatures who inhabit symbolic worlds, we have the uniquely human capacity to organise our experiences around the concept of an enduring self, and the ability to weave a story about that self that extends through time and helps us make sense of who were are and how to act in the world, if at the very least to spite post-modern claims of it being otherwise.
Most commonly, this is a story with work or family as a central theme, invited by that perennial cocktail party question “And what do you do?” It’s not often however, that we stop to consider our life story in its entirety. And that is probably a good thing, for it can be an anxious self-absorbing thing to do. The purpose of this year’s Xmas email to you is not to prompt the same search in yourself, but to reveal how I came to do exactly that and what I discovered, and in doing so hopefully share some of what I have been up to this year, particularly for those of you whilst not in my immediate life, are in my thoughts nevertheless. I hope also, that instead of devolving into just meaningless self-indulgent blabbering, there will be something salient you can relate to. With that in mind I have tried to include something for everyone no matter their stage of life, be it single/studying/travelling, enjoying the last few years of unmarried freedom, depressed or down and out, working on the art of giving to another whilst still maintaining a lively sense of self, departing or breaking up (may Janus, the Greek God of beginnings and endings, look favourably on you and may you be comforted in the knowledge that they are one and the same thing), moving into a more committed way of life with someone you love, or with children for the first time. What follows is a serious attempt to understand life from a developmental perspective, so be warned! To help you stay awake whilst you attempt to read this personal missive, ask someone to stand beside and poke you to a regulated rhythm with a sharp stick or slap you with a wet noodle. Coffee also works. For those hoping for something with a little more sordidness, perhaps some tales of love, lust and adventure on the high seas of life, I’m sorry but a better bet would be the David Attenborough epic The Private Life of Plants. Or just wait until next year’s Xmas email, which on second thoughts (knowing me) will probably be more of the same (all the while having to compete for your attention with Sir David’s new reptile and amphibian series – Life in Cold Blood).
I came back to NZ in early Feb 2007 feeling like a new person in an old familiar land. The first week back was great – seeing friends and family whom I hadn’t seen for over a year. And then the reverse cultural shock hit. I was already very burnt out to the point of not being able to make simple decisions before I left the Philippines, and so that plus the shock of migration lead to full scale physical incapacity for several weeks followed by 5 months of painful recovery.
Given this process occupied half of my year, I will talk a little about it. Its cognitive effect was a complete shock re-evaluation of what I had planned to do when I got back to NZ, and everything I had been doing until then. The disjuncture between life as I had lived it till then in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the old world of New Zealand, was a wide chasm of polar opposite values, priorities, perspectives, opportunities, and lifestyles. How do you reconcile that? The migration experience is an old and not uncommon one, and as the many of those who have lived through it will testify, not easy. The feeling is of being a split person, with different lives in different places with different people, and of a punctuated disjoint life story, which is not conducive to psychological wholeness and wellbeing. The rupture between travel and humanitarian work in Asia, and material culture and commercial work back in New Zealand threw into sharp relief my core values of intellectual curiosity coupled with humanitarian ideals. There are always particular values one strives for – be it creative independence, intellectual achievement, self-reliance, wealth, or whatever. But inflexibly high ideals come at a price; the devastating results of which I began to reap last year but only began to understand this year after returning from abroad. It was only when I was back in New Zealand earlier this year that I was able to label the sleepless nights, nausea, panic attacks, changes in appetite, and headaches I had been experience for the last 6 months in the Philippines as burnout.
Part of the challenge of readjusting to New Zealand life was that my perception of time changed from having plenty of it to realising that I am not going to live forever and that there are limits. That as educated middle class people, we have the greatest number of options and the least number of obstacles to choosing our lives, but that age is still the ultimate limiting factor. In the past I’d not taken many decisions seriously because I would think there was always time later to change. But the time to do things I might want to do is decreasing and some of the choices I made earlier, whilst perfect at the time, now seem careless given my current set of values. With that there come tinges of regret, of not living up to the childhood dreams laid out for me by those in my early and current peer groups, connived into that feeling by the guilt and insufficiency felt before the projected image of what I feel driven to achieve. These dreams are not my own, but nevertheless feel they have the weight of society behind them. But beware, for those who turn off the familiar course are not well supported by society – and that can be lonely. These are the hazy feelings that compose the background tone of my current living and influence decisions on which I take action.
When trying to work out what to do it is easy to fall into the strong normative assumption that there is one true course in career and love. Older age probably reveals the fallacy of this, but the belief may be essential to keep the search going long enough to find “the one” or to motivate us to experiment and try other things until we realise their falsity. My intention before leaving the Philippines was to study and finish my BA in Sociology. But burnout left me unable to trust my own judgement and incapable of making decisions so for 4 months I attended university and went to job interviews at the same time, completely unsure what I wanted to do. Everyday I would wake up thinking I should study, I’d go to class and that would confirm it. I would walk out of a class talking about the over-rationalized iron cage of modern organizational life and into a job interview where I would proclaim my capability, fit and desire as a well adjusted, results oriented, execution focused team-player who drives solutions and delivers value beyond expectations. By the end of the interview I would have convinced myself just as much as I’d convinced the hirer that I really wanted a job. Repeat the next day for the next couple of months. As it turned out I finished one semester of university, with only one left to go, before getting a new IT job in Auckland which is working well and teaching me that you can have a work-life balance. Issues of what to do in life are probably never conclusively solved, but over time lose their primacy. Other priorities take over, and whilst I am nowhere near that milestone, the huge investment in time and energy that child raising requires see these and other issues fade away, along with social life outside the family, as the focus shifts inward toward bringing up the children. These are issues however, that may resurface twenty years later when the children leave home. Will it only be then that I get around to fulfilling a dream to get an advanced degree in third world economic development and become a researcher?
Even for those who don’t have such a hard time making decisions, two major contrary impulses seem to be at work for iGen (the Internet Generation, or the generation formerly know as Generation Y) 20-somethings. One is the urge to explore and experiment, keeping everything tentative and easily reversible. This is something I have been good at till now, with periods abroad in several different countries, none lasting more than 1.5 years at a time. But with the change in perception of time, and the loneliness brought about whilst living in the Philippines, I am becoming aware of that other impulse – to build a firm, safe structure for the future – and that requires commitments. Some people are good at this and don’t feel the fear of being locked in. I see the necessity of this to achieve certain things but am still cautious. To travel abroad again would still be great, but perhaps next time it won’t be alone and I will have some financial foundations laid down first.
Being away 1.5 years before returning home was enough time away from New Zealand for my senses to become adjusted to the different daily rhythms of life in Asia. So on returning certain things stood out during that initial period when everything is seen in harsh contrast. It was the little things in everyday New Zealand life that stood out first. Like empty roads devoid of street stalls and people, greater variety of products on sale and more complex buying decisions, rolling grassy hills instead of flat rice paddies, the familiarity of your homeland versus the feeling of heading out on a motorbike into unknown territory, the familiarity of the roles you play in the usual circles versus the freedom of feeling like a different person in a different place.
It’s the small joys of New Zealand life that are not to be underestimated. Things such as access to a steady diet of media consumption including independent film theatres, plays, local and university libraries, drive time radio, NZ produced TV shows, and other popular and not so popular culture. But most importantly for a non-religious single person – friends and family, the new and old of both. It was a fine writer of female erotica (Anais Nin) who once said “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” and this year several new amazing worlds have been born for me. I’ve also found, as the proverbial wise old man once said, that “Friends aren’t jumper cables. You don’t throw them into the trunk and pull them out for emergencies”. This has been true for all the old friends who continue to remain friends even after long periods of physical absence. And family this year have become more like friends.
2007 has been peppered with a few other random projects to fill out the 67 hours left in a week after subtracting for sleep and travel time. Highlight and lowlights include a marathon relay race, breaking my toe, and other delights being part of the NZ Japan Society, losing large amounts of money on the stock market, winning a free trip to Rarotonga courtesy of 91ZM and the listeners who liked my sob story of why I should go on “Rehab in Raro”, applying to become a marriage celebrant but being rejected by the powers-that-be, passing cars on my scooter as I ride to work everyday (the bigger, more expensive, less fuel-efficient the car the greater the pleasure), gaining 10kgs and acquiring the belly of an expectant mother-to-be, donating my brain to science and becoming a medical research guinea pig (two trials, one looking at the effect of depression & stress on memory and learning, and the other on the effects of exercise on depression & stress), hanging out at the Mangére refugee resettlement centre, being offered a scholarship to do social statistical research at the University of Auckland, and mowing lawns.
So I’ve said enough, if not too much, to answer the cocktail party classic “What do you do?” for another year. So we can skip that question next we meet, although if I haven’t heard from you lately I’ll probably be asking you exactly that 
As it turned out, my Grandmother wasn’t interested in the Up Series we watched together last Saturday. She’s too busy finishing the last few months of her life to worry about that. When you are that old, the perspective is very different. For her it is one of fulfilment and gratitude. A life worth living – may we all have that this Xmas and beyond.
Love,
Oliver
25 December 2007
Auckland, New Zealand
