Esperando (The Space In Between)

Before I start the rest of my post, I want to mention Puerto Rico, which has been on my mind as it has been on many others after the blatant disrespect and deadly neglect it has faced from the president since Hurricane Maria blew through immediately after Irma.

It is so important that we stay educated and aware. You can read and share this statement (in English and Español) describing the facts and a clear course of action.

Here is a list of trusted organizations and fundraisers you can contribute to.

My friend and fellow Fulbrighter wrote,

"If you're not a part of the Puerto Rican diaspora it might be hard to understand why so many of us born and raised on the mainland, who may not have even seen the Island, hold it so close to who we are. Why so many of us march in parades across the US every June singing and dancing and taking up space in a country that reminds us that we don't even own the space we got our names from. But that's what makes the Island so special. That not even 500 years of colonialism could silence us."

It feels like there are so many things happening around the world that they are hard to face and it's difficult to feel like there is any action you can take that will make a difference... but I try not to let that stop me from acting anyways.

As I have mentioned before on this blog, sometimes I've felt like life is on pause here, and I have to remember that it's not. One of the ways I've found to help me stay in touch is to follow podcasts, like KQED's Bay Curious and NPR's Up First, LatinoUSA, and Radio Ambulante in Spanish.

I have a lot of time here spent waiting, during which I'm able to listen.

In fact, I think time spent waiting has been an aspect of culture shock that me and several other Fulbrighters have experienced.

The word for waiting in Spanish is the same as the word for hoping: esperando.

This feels especially true while esperando el colectivo/"waiting for the bus"/really freakin' hoping it comes soon.

Seriously. There are 8 buses that pass by my bus stop home from school, and I can take 2 of them to get home. That's a pretty good chance that one of my buses will come by relatively quickly. But one night this week, I waited for 45 minutes while buses numbered 15, 17, 10, 11, 12, 18, and 10 again passed by-- every single one of the buses I can't take-- before I was finally able to catch the 19 home.

This Friday, I had three missions I wanted to accomplish in the city center: I wanted to renew my visa for another 90 days so that it would last the extra two weeks I needed before I leave the country, I wanted to register myself for a Spanish exam in November, and I wanted to book a hotel for my parents and I to stay in.

I waited at the bus stop for a bus heading downtown. I walked to the Delgación de migrantes, went upstairs, and sat down and waited for about twenty minutes to be seen by a representative. When I spoke to someone, he told me I would need to wait until my visa was about to expire; I couldn't renew it in advance. So I walked to the Facultad de lenguas and asked to register for the Spanish exam... and was told I couldn't register there, I would have to register online, wait for an email with instructions, and then come in to pay for the registration. Finally I made it to the address of the hotel that my parents and I wanted to book, but the door was locked and there was a keypad at the side. I walked down the block looking for another entrance, found none, walked back, waited outside for a moment to see if I could see anyone, and then decided we'd have to call the hotel later.

At one point in time, I think that series of events would have made me feel like a failure. I would have been upset at the waste of the day. But for some reason, I didn't feel that bad about it. Since I was downtown, I stopped by one of the attractions I hadn't gotten around to yet: la cripta jesuítica, the Jesuit Crypt:

It's really cool, very dark and damp...

And it's directly underneath the busy street that I used to live under...

After that I waited for the bus home and took a short siesta before class.

It can be easy to feel like the waiting moments of life don't really count. Feeling this way makes waiting for something very frustrating. It drives people to road rage while sitting in traffic, or leads to complaints at a restaurant for slow service on a busy night, or creates awkwardness during the silence while someone is thinking of what to say.

For many people, especially in the States, time spent waiting is time wasted. That doesn't mean we never wait for things-- there are a lot of things you have to wait for wherever in the world you are.

Here, I've gotten used to waiting.

When I was applying for post-college fellowships, one of my advisors, a member of the Japanese faculty, talked with me about a Japanese character called ma. He thought that ma was an important concept related to my applications and to the experience of being abroad in general.

According to Wikipedia, ma "can be roughly translated as 'gap,' 'space,' 'pause' or 'the space between two structural parts.'"

Ma is negative space. It's, as my high school figure drawing teacher would have said, "the Not." That which is not, that which is in between two states of being.

Ma is what makes Miyazaki films so real, so touching: those moments of animation that are not necessary, that do not  forward the plot or reveal key new information, but during which the viewer is able to just be, to contemplate alongside the characters. (Search "Ma in Miyazaki" on Google and you'll find a whole bunch of essays on this, and this scene from Spirited Away is a beautiful example.)

While waiting for something, we are in that place described by ma, a space of time which is in between two fixed points.

And my experience living abroad in Argentina is itself a kind of in-between... I've taken a break from "normal life"; I don't totally fit in but I no longer feel like a total stranger; part of me has been waiting anxiously to get back home while the other part of me is just living in this space.

It's funny, I think when I get home I'm actually going to miss the waiting, the time in between.

To finish this blog post, I want to share a really really long stream-of-consciousness sentence that I wrote on my phone on Monday afternoon while on the bus, recording a moment/feeling that wouldn't have happened if it weren't for all of the periods of waiting in between activities:

I arrived at my aerial rope class this afternoon having just finished the 13th episode of the podcast Millennial (y'all should go listen to that episode right now because it is like my favorite thing in the entire world) and some soft folksie music was playing (which I later realized was from an album with a song called San Francisco) while we warmed up waiting for class to start, stretching on the yoga balls, and I was just feeling really happy and appreciative and I started thinking about the other Fulbrighter who is in Córdoba with me, who I have really grown to love and appreciate and who I found myself missing over the weekend, and my friend Evan who I admire so much and who I can't wait to bake with again and how we recently had a conversation about how much we appreciate each other, and my sister who has grown into a person I am so proud of, and it just kept snowballing and I kept thinking of all of the people I love- the people I do circus with, especially the one who was more of a beginner like me and comes every Monday and Wednesday on her red bicycle and we commiserate over the slow struggle to build strength, and the Fulbrighter who took me in to her apartment in Puerto Madryn and made sure I had fun and enjoyed myself and is just super cool, and the professor I work with and her mom who have been so sweet to me and really taken me in and deserve so much more than I can give in return, and my housemates from college and my friends back home and my family and all of the Bay Area based organizations that inspire me to live in the city I love and do work I love no matter what it takes-- and that feeling of loving so many people so much made me start to tear up while I was lying upside down on the yoga ball and it was just a really nice moment and now that I wrote it all out it feels gushy af but ah it's true haha it is the best thing in the world, it is the feeling worth living for.