The Cyclades Islands of Greece dot the middle of the Aegean Sea and for practical purposes constitute the far eastern border of the Mediterranean. From a global standpoint, they are directly south of mainland Greece and Bulgaria – sort of sandwiched in the corner between the old-block communist countries of Eastern Europe, and the edges of the Middle East at Turkey. According to Google Earth, the Cyclades lie 5,429 nautical miles from where I was born and like most exotic destinations it was high on the list of places I never expected to see. But when a good friend wanted to go there this summer and was looking for a travel companion, the adventure sounded like fun so I signed on.
While my travels within the United States have been fairly extensive, international trekking was new for me. Aside from Canada and Mexico (which were basically just day trips across the border), the only travel I’d been exposed to outside the US was a Spring Break trip to Japan, back when I was a sophomore in high school.. I was 15 years old then – half-my-life ago – and almost certainly, I lacked the maturity to view the experience from a standpoint of personal growth. Though I’ve always appreciated the idea of seeing the world, the international travel bug had never really taken hold of me.
Of Greece specifically, I knew almost nothing. Like most people, I took Western Civilization in high school and college, and I understood the basics of the nation’s history: cradle of democracy, different gods for everything under the sun, the first Olympics, and something about a really big wooden horse. I had no idea what Greece was like in the 21st century, and on a larger scale, I did not realize how much ancient Greece continued to influence modern culture, not only there, but across the western world.
My journey around the globe to Greece was a uniquely personal experience and was likely rooted in a deeper need to see things from a metaphorical standpoint – to interpret, and to search. Frankly, one doesn’t just lay down a couple of grand and rush off to far corners of the globe to stand in the shadow of dilapidated temples unless there’s significance to it, or a level of self-awareness that comes as a result of it. It had to mean something. And in form typical to my nature that “something” needed to be examined under the scope of my own reality, and then shared within the confines of my very simple life back in Minnesota.
In the posts that follow I plan to rehash my trip, share some photos and fun memories, while digging for the heart of what Greece meant to me, and what the experience did for my own level of self-actualization. To be honest, I’m not sure what I’m trying to accomplish here, or what I have left to learn. Then again, it could be argued that writing is a completely selfish undertaking – the purging and renewing of one’s soul, if you will.
To understand what Greece meant to my life at large, I suppose a brief unraveling of the events that led up to it is necessary. This past summer, my efforts at blogging and writing in general have faded off to practically nothing so maybe an explanation of that is the first step.
Just shy of six months ago, my grandfather passed away. Although the event was not entirely unexpected, it sent something of shockwave through my life and, to an extent, altered the essence of my own identity. He and I were close. I spent the last part of my teenage years, and my early 20’s working for the man, helping him on the ranch, and learning his trade. I’ve always believed that the frame of time between ages 18 and 23-ish is critical in a person’s life, or at least it was in mine. The decisions I was making and the life I was leading seemed to point me in the direction of my future. Looking back with the unfair advantage of hindsight, it feels as though my time with my grandfather represented a great precipice that would define the decade which followed, and ultimately bring my life to where it is today.
That’s not to say I’ve been living the life my grandfather lived or that I’ve been harboring my own meager existence within his shadow; quite the contrary, in fact. He was a cowboy and a rancher, and though I’ve dabbled in that life, it isn’t where I ended up, nor is it where my future will take me. Strangely though, the experience of living that existence provided lessons that I still carry with me and in more ways that I ever realized at the time, those lessons have dictated the course of my life.
With Grandpa suddenly gone, I felt a bit lost. It wasn’t that I was sad (though I did grieve as would be expected). It was almost as though my own identity was left with a big damn hole in it and it took a long time to get my mind around that. Sort of like the building blocks of my life had all fallen down and I knew there was no way they could ever be stacked up in quite the same order again. The personal journey that followed was neither planned nor expected, and it can’t exactly be documented blow-by-blow because… well… I guess I don’t fully understand it myself. What I do understand is that my priorities began to change quickly after Grandpa died, and at 30 years old, I was examining my life and its direction with a sense of freshness I hadn’t experienced in years.
The spring and summer that followed were somewhat monumental just by measure of how distorted my life became in relation to what it had previously been, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. I stopped writing altogether, which seemed completely against my nature, but was oddly refreshing. I read more than I ever had before – much more in fact – and I branched out significantly in the level of what I was reading and the amount of thinking I did during and after. I joined a gym and hired a trainer. I went out more, got drunk more, and felt less guilty about it; in fact I didn’t feel guilty at all. My approach to education changed too, and through the course of summer school, I found myself really appreciating my Humanities classes, and not worrying about the fact that I might half-ass an assignment in Principles of Management. From an ethical perspective, out-right cheating in calculus was only a stone’s throw away and I didn’t care. I still don’t.
When it came to people, I felt like I had become very settled in who I associated with and the things that we did. Something about that felt restrained and over the last few months I’ve invested a lot more energy into the people with whom my connection was based on the future, rather than the past. I let a few friendships drift away and I put perhaps more effort and time into cultivating those that seemed to feel the most comfortable.
My family gained an almost unspoken sense of importance in my life and somewhat unexpectedly, I simply stopped caring about the past. Thanks to some strategic business trips, I was able to spend over a month of the summer in my hometown and I felt a sense of comfort with my family that I don’t believe I’ve known in many years. I realized that the kinship we all share doesn’t have to change just because our lives do. This led me to a firm belief that people don’t ever really change. Our priorities, our circumstances, our levels of healthiness, and even divisiveness, the facts that make up our current lives, and the masks we wear to deal with those facts – all of those things change, but the essence of who we are does not. With the right amount of clear-headedness that’s easy to see, and in my new-found realization I felt comfort and in many ways, I healed.
In ways that I can’t fully explain I just stopped caring about things I can’t change and the I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude bled over into decisions about life, money, and people – risky perhaps, but fun and fresh. I learned to be more carefree without being stupid. This somehow helped me to stop asking pointless and unanswerable questions of myself that had haunted me for years. Questions about life, meaning, religion – things that will simply happen the way they happen regardless of what I do about it, or how much I care about it – all went away. For the first time in my adult life I stopped praying altogether, and I realize now that I lost my faith in God many years ago. That doesn’t hurt or scare me anymore. And philosophical waxing about the events that led up to that mindset… well, it’s just not worth the energy. With that consciousness comes a freedom that I can’t explain but it feels good… very good!
And so, somewhere in the middle of all this movement within my own life and mind, a random trip around the globe to visit the crucible of civilization seemed to fit almost poetically as a curtain to one of the best summers of my life. So with a fresh perspective, I set out this summer to learn about Greece, and in the process I learned a lot about myself and about society. The Greeks had a fundamental impact on western civilization – that goes without saying. But perhaps more importantly, the study of them, at least for me, seems to ring with truisms from my own life and modern society, again fostering the belief that people as individuals and as a group never really change, even across the barriers of millennia.
If you study the ancient Greeks as an adult, outside the confines of a G-rated high school textbook, there’s one glaring fact that will literally jump out of the pages of history and smack to you in the face: the Greeks were kinky! Almost everything in their culture revolved around sex – every kind of sex you can imagine, and a few you probably can’t. I’m almost shocked at how our modern education system has managed to whitewash that fact right out of western history. I suppose I can see the reason for it, but it distorts the reality… drastically. Perhaps if my teacher had included it way back then, I might have paid more attention.
To be Greek 2,500 years ago was to live one of two ways: as the agitator, or as the subservient peon, and this probably changed back and forth throughout one’s existence. No matter what your station in life, there wasn’t much in between. In a class system where slave-owning was not only accepted but expected, and the city down the road might just come wipe yours off the map at any given time, I suspect that people saw themselves, their families, their communities, even their cultures as being either on top or bottom. So the sex-connection seems relevant. To be quite literal about it, you were either a fucker or a fuckee, but either way, there was a lot of “fucking” going on. Spend a little time in Greece today and you can’t help but realize how much the ancients viewed sex as a metaphor for everything else in life. Are we really that much different 2000 years later? Truthfully, the impact of sex on society was probably about the same in ancient Greece as it is today in 21st century pop culture. The only difference is that the Greeks didn’t feel guilty about it.
Still, an education on Greek history is much more than a crash course in Freudian theory, and its history notwithstanding, there’s something to be said for modern Greece as well.
So with the backdrop of my own personal growth, or whatever it is that I’ve gone through this summer, my study of Greece and my eleven short days there and in the Islands seem to have culminated an event in my life that I can’t quite define. I feel the meaning in it, but I don’t understand it yet. So, in reaching for something that I’m not sure what is (see how people never really change?) I’m going to continue the story of my journey in the weeks ahead. I’m not sure how long it will last, and I may not be able to explain it when I’m done, but I suppose I’ll know when I get there.
