somewhere-over-there

Jet lag could be considered a side effect of disorientation. Of course your body tells you it's tired. But what about the place you've just left, the people you've just met, the language(s) you've been speaking.

In 1987 I got back from India to Israel. On the bus from the airport near Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it felt like everyone was speaking to me. After a year and a half of staying around mostly English speaking people, Hebrew became like a secret language. I could walk along the streets of Melbourne, Delhi or Singapore with an Israeli acquaintance and talk about things, knowing hardly anyone around would understand. It was and still is the feeling of privacy in the public domain. Since then computers got into almost anyone's lives, the internet exploded from there shortly after and cellphones followed the same path. With technology comes the need to acquire new literacies. Eventually we keep on using language almost in the same way and for the same purpose. We communicate. We exchange information, insights, emotions.

Getting back from Israel to Vancouver recently, brought up the notion of disorientation. After a week's visit to family and friends, I am back home with my Hebrew speaking wife and daughter in a mostly English speaking society. It feels home. It feels detached. Did I say everything I had to say to the people I have just left behind? Am I talking to Anat, my wife, about what I experienced in Israel or about my plans for the future? Did I leave anything behind? Am I worried about the future?

These days I am working on re-establishing my design business after two years in a landscape architecture office. In those two years the idea of becoming a professional landscape architect was a tangible prospect. I am interested in urban design. My training is industrial design. Whatever I did in my life can be seen as designing stuff. But my attitude, it seems, has also been managing stuff. Mostly what I've done was manage myself. This time around I am about to find myself managing others as well.

Would that be a result of my jet lag or my disorientation?