I never thought throwing a piece of toilet paper into the toilet would be anything worth writing about. Nevertheless, there I stood in a Houston airport bathroom, feeling guilty about the piece of paper that was about to fall from my hands into the water waiting below. It had been exactly two months since I had flushed toilet paper. Before I knew what happened, the paper was prematurely auto-sucked down with enough force to swallow a small child. The next piece felt more natural. I was back in the States.
For those of you who don’t know, I flew home Friday, November 13th to surprise my old man the next day at his surprise 50th birthday party. I was home for less than five days and, looking back on them now, they feel like a weird dream I had in the middle of my Central American adventure.
What caught me off guard at first was driving up the NJ Turnpike and I-95 with my girlfriend, Julie. The wide, well-lit lanes, the tolls, the bridges, and the impatient Jersey drivers weaving from shoulder to shoulder to save thirty seconds on their trip – everything felt so… well… normal. New Jersey was still the same New Jersey that I’ve known my entire life.
That night and the next day all happened too quickly for me to notice anything different about home or myself. Waking up next to Julie felt too good to be true. On the trip to my house, I was too anxious about surprising my dad and not somehow blowing the surprise in the last minutes beforehand. Walking into my house I was bombarded with a blur of faces and middle-aged men getting drunk in honor of my dad reaching the half-century mark. I stuffed my belly full of Italian food, imported German beer and birthday cake and cookies. And I got to see my best buddies from home. I was scared it would all seem different or foreign now, but I seamlessly slipped back into the old routine. Sometimes it’s nice how things just don’t change.
It was only during the next couple days, after all the excitement died down, that I started noticing the little things. Monday was exceptionally warm for a mid-November day and, since I didn’t have a car or car insurance, I decided to go for a couple hour bike ride around my town. As I rode through these familiar streets, everything was so quiet. It was almost eerie. The night before I flew home, I stayed with a Guatemalan girl named Italia. She visited Austin, Texas to see a Grad School and she told me what struck her most was how all the houses had perfectly maintained lawns and the parks had brand new jungle gyms and basketball courts, yet there was not a person to be seen. She joked that in Guatemala, this playground would’ve been beaten to shit already but that there’d still be people there at all times. I shared her confusion on this beautiful autumn day and when the streets were abandoned.
On Monday, I decided to visit Julie for the night up in Connecticut. On the way home the following morning, I looked out the window from my spacious Amtrak seat and took in the remaining colors of fall. I noticed the suburbs, too – the cookie-cutter houses with their backyards and second stories, the well-paved streets and sidewalks, the cars moving in a well-choreographed dance between stop signs and lights. Everything was so tidy and organized. I thought back to the streets of Guatemala: both the windy, essentially lawless highways and the city streets congested with black-fume spewing buses and trucks and cars without blinkers. All the exceptional things here that I never notice, I thought to myself, that we never notice.
Finally, my last Ah-hah moment came when I was helping my dad put away the dishes in the kitchen. He let the hot water run over the dirty dishes in the sink as he leisurely strolled about the kitchen and to his bedroom and back. Almost instantly as he left the room I thought of the dirty, amoeba-ridden faucet water of Guatemala. I thought of what my host family would think if they saw so much clean, drinkable going to waste. How could I ever justify it? I stopped loading the cups into the dishwasher to turn off the faucet. I am not one-hundred percent sure why. I mean, it’s not like I could’ve saved that excess water, bottled it up and delivered it personally to my Guate-family. But access to something as seemingly basic as clean water is not as basic as we’d like to believe. It is a blessing, and for us to treat it as anything less than that would be a sin.
And it doesn’t just stop with water. Think about washers and dryers. Sure, you’ve gotta wait an hour or so for your clothes to be clean and dry, but most Guatemalans that I’ve met do their laundry by hand, scrubbing the clothes in a cement sink and letting them air-dry for a couple days. I’ve tried it. It’s quite the forearm workout, but I’d much rather toss my clothes in a machine and forget about them for an hour. Just about everyone I know in the States can get on the internet whenever they want in the privacy and comfort of their own homes. It’s really incredible, if you think about it, how much great information we have access to at any given moment – we can watch TV shows, get news from around the world, watch YouTube videos on how to fix a flat bike tire or how to salsa. It’s also really sad when you think about how much we can complain that Facebook isn’t loading fast enough. Or think about driving. Yeah, it sucks being stuck in traffic, but after seeing the roads here, I’ll take traffic lights and organized merges over roadway anarchy any day.
My good buddy Paul asked me in an e-mail if I thought people leading simpler lives here in Guatemala made them happier. I told him that I don’t know if it makes them happier, but it definitely keeps things in perspective. That is, what is important in life. But after thinking about it a bit more, I think it also forces them to make the most out of what they have. For example, I’ve seen a family of five fit on one motorcycle. Husband, wife, and three kids. No joke. When you don’t have much, everything you do have becomes that much more valuable. Back home in the States, we are spoiled, myself included. After all, I drank about two gallons of milk every week for the past eight years. It’s not healthy, physically or spiritually. But it’s not that we have to feel bad that we have so much, provided that we’re actually aware of how much we have. It’s all in our attitudes. And if we take time to mix some gratitude into our attitudes, we’ll find ourselves appreciating the little things more. All of a sudden, sitting in traffic sucks a little less because all of a sudden just having a car becomes pretty damn sweet. Each meal is a little tastier because just having food is something to celebrate. If the internet decides to crap out for no apparent reason we won’t fret because we’ll realize how awesome it is having it the other 364 days of the year. When you’re surrounded with the exceptional, it’s easy for it all to start looking ordinary. That’s why it’s on us to consciously remember how damn good we really have it.
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