La Grande Vie

I want to talk to you about The Big Life (or La Grande Vie, as I called it in my first work of French pseudo-fiction, which I may or may not share with you at a later date, if you promise not to judge me by my grammar).

The Big Life: what is it? What makes a life small, restricted, or ingrown, and what makes it expansive, possibility-ridden, unencumbered? Is it where you live? Is it the people with whom you surround yourself? Is it finances, or family, or a sense of independence?

I remember doing a family history project with a bunch of six-year-olds a few years ago for social studies.  One of the things I asked the students to do was to talk to their parents about their origins.  Paper after paper came back to me, saying, “I was born in Lindsay.  My parents were born in Lindsay.  My grandparents were born in Lindsay.”

Now, Lindsay is not Toronto, or Montreal, or New York, or Paris.  Lindsay is a small, rural community in the middle of (pretty much) nowhere.  It has its charms, to be sure, but there is nothing particularly distinguishing about it.  Even Bobcaygeon, a small rural community even deeper in the middle of nowhere, has a massive shoe store to commend itself to the wider world.  But Lindsay? It’s just a little Canadian town, surrounded by lakes, trees, and farmland.

“What small lives these people lead,” I thought to myself, as I imagined generation after generation living, marrying, and dying on one little speck of this great earth.  “I don’t want a small life.  I want The Big Life.  I want to Go.”

Going is a form of enlargement, I’m sure of it.  In the last three years, I’ve visited a dozen countries scattered across four continents.  I’ve lost track of the cities and airports I’ve passed through, the mountains I’ve climbed, the seas I’ve sailed, the terrain I’ve trekked.  And I live now in a foreign land that is about as far removed from little Lindsay, both geographically and culturally, as it could possibly be.

Is this The Big Life? It sure feels like it, when I’m scuba diving in the Mediterranean or camping out in the Sahara.  One does not ride camels in Lindsay.  One does not barter for one’s daily necessities.  One does not wonder how to say “thank-you” in Polish or “please” in Hungarian.  One certainly does not climb the Great Wall of China.  These are Big Life things.  They are things that cannot be done in any alternative form of “elsewhere.”  They are unique, defining, unreplicable experiences.  That’s what The Big Life is all about, right? It’s about Doing Big Things and posting them on Facebook for all the world to see.  Look at me and my gigantic, interesting life!

The Great Wall of China

The Bavarian Alps

The Eiffel Tower

Surfing in Dar Bouazza

Tiananmen Square, under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao

The Greek Acropolis

Berber bridal wear

The Sahara Desert

Camel trekking

Venice, Italy

The Atlas Mountains

Nice, France

Scuba diving in Greece

Buying oranges at the medina

You should know, though, that taking selfies with Chairman Mao is not representative of the real, everyday, Standard-Sized Life that I live in Casablanca.  If anything, my Moroccan life has been one of shrinkage and thinning (not in body-size, unfortunately, but that’s another story).

Let me tell you what I mean.

In Peterborough, I owned my own house with a beautiful garden in which I grew my own vegetables.  I climbed into my brand-new Subaru every day and drove 30 minutes to another municipality to go to work.  I walked down the street without fear of harassment.  I understood everything, everywhere I went, because everything was in my language of choice.  Going to the pharmacy or the library was a simple thing.  Ridiculously simple.  These may seem like Small Things, but they become Big Things, when you find that you have lost them.

Now here I am in Morocco, where I share an apartment with several other women, and have a two-minute walk down the hill to get to work.  I do normal classroom things all day, every day, and then I walk back up the hill to do French grammar and watch French television in my bedroom, huddled up to a space heater, because I have lost that other Great Big Thing called central heating.

I eat most of my meals at the school cafeteria.  My yoga classes, Zumba classes, French lessons, haircuts, and a good number of my (admittedly limited) social events occur on school property.  Most days of the week, most hours of my life are lived within the four concrete walls that enclose the property on which I live and work.  There are security cameras and guards everywhere, keeping track of all of the comings and goings.  And just outside the imposing, metal gates, there is a little hut where the king’s soldiers are always watching, watching, watching (partly because the opulent summer palace is just across the street, and partly because Westerners must always be under both protection and surveillance).  These are Heavy Things that can lead to a very Small Life, indeed.

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Now, don’t be misled.  I am hardly a prisoner.  My tendency to stay within the walls is self-imposed.  I own a car.  I can use it to go wherever I want, whenever I want.  But if you have ever driven in a Moroccan city, you know that one does not do so for pleasure.  Ever.  One does it out of necessity.  The occasional need to purchase food that does not come from the school cafeteria.  Doctor’s visits.  Pharmacies.  Concerts.  Normal things.  Normal things that still, after three years, do not feel normal to me, because they are coloured by the constant angst of attempting to navigate a cityscape that is not made for spoiled foreigners like me.

Do you want some examples? Most of them have to do with taxis, except for the ones that have to do with everything else.  If you haven’t lived here as an ex-pat, you don’t know that it can take three hours to find a doctor’s office, and another two hours to find your way home.  You don’t know about the constant cat-calling, the threatening behaviour, the aggressive vendors and the false guides.  You don’t know about the corrupt police officers or the gaping holes in the sidewalks.  These are Bigger Things than the other Big Things.  They make life outside the campus walls an exhausting thing, to be carried out once weekly, or twice at most.

That is how my Big Life feels, most of the time.  My social circles get smaller each year, as more and more of the people who came to Morocco with me in 2015 finish their contracts and go back to their Medium-Sized Lives, or start a Big Life somewhere else.  And I am here, in my bedroom, studying French vocabulary.  Because that is what I do when I am not flying around, doing Big Things.

So, which life is bigger? The life of staying, or the life of going? Or is it just the transit time in between that inflates or deflates one’s experience of inhabiting a particular place?

I visited the Greek island of Santorini in October.  It is an other-worldly incarnation of paradise.  Walking the cliffs from village to village, looking out over the Aegean Sea, feels like a Great Big Thing To Do.  But grumpy What’s-his-name, who ran the hotel I stayed in, was born and raised on that small island.  I don’t know if he’s ever left.  Would Morocco be a Big Thing for him? Would Lindsay?

It could be that The Big Life has nothing to do with where you are or how you live.  If that’s the case, then my Standard-Sized Life is nothing special.  In fact, I’m certain it’s not.

So, why do I keep coming back to this walled-in life? Why have I signed on for a fourth year, in a place that is rife with challenges, whenever it’s not downright lonely?

It’s because the Big Life that keeps eluding me is still here, hiding around the winding street corners and waiting at the airport for my next jaunt to who-knows-where.  The Big Life is nesting in the enormous hearts of the people with whom I interact each day.  It beckons from within this melodic, but labyrinthine language that I stubbornly refuse to abandon.  It exists in the pathways that form in my mind as I move through familiar and unfamiliar spaces, trying to make sense of the Bigness and the Smallness of my place within this world.

Maybe you read my ramblings from time to time, and wish that you, too, could abandon your Standard-Sized-Life for an exotic life of travel and adventure.  But consider this:

Do you have a family to come home to every day? A partner, children, or grandchildren to love? You have a Big Life.  Bigger than mine, perhaps.

Do you have some certainty about where you will be in five, ten, twenty years? You have a Big Life.  Do you have separate GPS coordinates for home, work, and leisure? You have a Big Life.  Do you walk down the street, head uncovered, without being ogled or taunted? You have a Big Life.  Do you, like my Lindsay schoolchildren, feel rooted in a community, able to pinpoint one definitive piece of property as “home”? You have a Big Life.  You have the life that I aspire to, when all of my wanderlust is satisfied, and I want, at last, to know where I belong.

Right now, I belong here, and there, and everywhere.  It’s the life I’ve chosen, and I have no regrets.  Nor should you.  A Life, it turns out, cannot be quantified at all.  Just live, and find the bigness that is all around you, no matter where you are.  Just live!