The Russians Return To Nicaragua: Mike´s POV

Atlanta looked comparatively plain out the window when the jet touched down on the tarmac.  It was a perfectly reasonable day, but I was viewing it against the unforgiving backdrop of a just-concluded week in, for all intents and purposes, paradise.  Instinctually, despite the unwelcomed symbolism of the action, I flipped on my blackberry for the first time in a week.  I left it alone for a few minutes to silently go berserk in my pocket as I gathered my backpack and duty free rum.  When it finished vibrating, I glanced at the painful numbers of unread work E-Mails.  As the first one I'd read, I selected the message with zero potential follow-up responsibilities: The Merriam Webster Word of the Day, January 21.  The word was "weltschmerz," pronounced VELT-shmairts, and it means a mental apathy caused by comparison of current state with an ideal state.  As I walked down the hallway towards customs, my skin unevenly dark and salty since the quick bucket shower I took in the morning, and my hair maintaining the consistency of pine straw, I thought about the blatant irony that went along with that Email showing up on the date of my return.

I'll quickly mention something in order to ensure I don't forget to: the trip was insanely fun.  Both Nicaragua and Sam proved to be natural hosts.  It was safe, but not too safe, relaxing but not too relaxed, drunk but not too drunk, organized but not too organized, and clothed, but still pretty damn naked at times.  Frank and Allison's contributions to Nic of Time have been great strides in the daunting task of textually capturing perhaps the greatest abroad experience I've had.  I'm going to forego adding to the storytelling and instead prod a little at the things that our trip to Nica have caused to putter around in my head ever since my reluctant return.

First off, my friend Sam Shepard.  All we've really heard about Sam’s progress and experiences related to his travels, local fluency, and the constitution of his stomach, have been from his perspective.  This makes it relatively difficult to understand just how he's changed over the course of his experience without his inherent modesty filtering the details.  Personally, that was probably the thing I was most anticipating finding out with my visit.  I talked to Sam on the phone a few hours before his initial departure from the states.  He spoke unsteady, quiet English in a manner that projects the distant image of him standing in a dark room.  I realized after hanging up that I had never come close to being in that kind of a position: standing at the edge of a cliff you spent weeks climbing to exhaustion, with basically no idea how the descent will be.  And then he jumped - into the plane, into Nica, into the Peace Corp.  I have no experience with how that kind of a leap shatters your routine and forces your life into perfect ambiguity.  The questions it raised for Sam must have been countless.  The only real question it raised for the guys and gals back home was "what's all this going to do to Sam?" 

As a 3rd party who spent a week with him, I’m taking the opportunity to provide an unfiltered evaluation of this, and I'm happy to report that he's clearly taken the experience thus far in unshakable strides, and is currently just KILLIN IT down there.

It was truly impressive.  Sam led us from one adventure to the next, issuing commands to local swindlers to get lost and getting us passed obviously corrupt law enforcement without paying a penny of the bribe they were expecting.

To capture what's changed, I went back a couple years to March and April of 2010, when Sam was probably in his campus apartment convincing the party to relocate a few doors over so that my apartment took the brunt force of it.  We had just about all of our best friends on and around that apartment block.  We were all in the same place: our comfort zones.  It's an apparently idealistic state where each day is a breeze except for the lingering knowledge that it was all going to end soon.  Only now do I realize that in the grand-scheme of things, that static comfort zone is one of the last places you want to spend very long periods of time.

It's become apparent to me during the course of my recent career and then solidified during my time in Nica, that the largest part of growing up into the person you're targeting, where nothing that falls in front of you can shake you, is expanding your comfort zone to include all of the potential obstacles.  And the only way to expand it is to leap out of the preconceived idealistic state into something that you really aren't sure how to handle right now.  But once you wrestle it to the turf and subdue it, you own it forever, and you say "what else you got?" to the world.

Let me reel this into orbit.  What all this has to do with Sam is that he is far and away the best illustration of the process I just described.  He left college and flew to a foreign country, landing in a rather undesirable city where the cement flood ditches beside the roads are filled with burning trash during the dry season.  Probably as far outside his comfort zone he'll ever get in one leap.  He landed there and stared total uncertainty in the face. 

And he won.

Now as he further conquers the current situation, he'll take the looming complacency that this kind of victory brings with it and build it into a fire under his ass, to promote that perpetual challenge that I believe the very most successful people in the world share.  Because now if the same thing falls on his desk two days in a row, he'll feel that complacency and look around from something more.

Sam's got all that now, and it shows me what kind of a level I need to get to.  And it's possible what I learned from the trip isn't entirely about career ambition or drive.  It may also be about developing a transparency in your life's work and hoping to hell that through that window is something meaningful.  Hoping it's eventually leading to something that's positively impacting the world, impacting individual distinct faces, and therefore impacting you as well.