Back down to earth

So. I have been home for a week and sleep patterns are finally getting back to normal. By next week, the jet lag questions (all well meaning :) ) will go away and I will be back to my daily struggle of getting up, working, working out, walking dogs and squeezing the rest of life in before and after work. Good problem to have.

I have been thinking a lot about my trip and realizing more and more the depths of my ignorance.

In John Kennedy Toole's excellent, wonderful, biting, delightful, hilarious and insightful "Confederacy of Dunces" the main characer, Ignatius Reilly, complains constantly about inferiors who cannot comprehend his "world view." If you have read it, you know the feeling of recoiling in hilarious horror at the thought of sharing such frightening, bizarre and ludicrous views. Looking at it another way, though, you realize how Toole was using an exaggerated character to mock a general lack of cultural knowledge among, maybe Americans, maybe anyone group of people that lives in such a distinct, unique, community as the New Orleans of his novel was.

Visiting India for such a brief time made me understand that there is much more to traveling than standing by monuments and visiting gardens. It is a chance to understand a different point of view. That view may not be so different if you are Western and traveling in another Western culture. West-to-East is where the viewpoints really diverge.

My view of the world is totally Western, and culturally young. If you are from Asia or even Europe, I think you tend to take a much longer, more tempered, cynical and not-so-excitable view of things.

So now I have this story that I have been part of, and that is now part of me, to adjust the way I view the world.

And to remind me of how little I know. Ignatius Reilly would not stand for it!