Remind Me: Why Am I Here?

Traveling creates memories. Think of your camera sitting in a drawer or on a shelf. The last time you probably used it was on vacation, when its memory card was filled with hundreds of photos. These memories are the spice to our everyday lives. These mental souvenirs are the excuses we use to break out of our everyday routine in the first place. We do this so that when day runs into day, and monotony threatens our imagination, we can look at those photos with a travel buddy and recall those experiences we definitely wouldn't have had at home.

What happens, though, when you live in the postcard? Of course, it's never as ideal as that, but it's definitely what people think of your living abroad, and let's face it, what you'd like your overseas life to be like, too. But hey, life is life, and monotonous routine inevitably settles in like a snotty-nosed neighbor kid who insists on following you around. That's when you start to forget your memory. The vacation period is over and you find yourself living in a sub-zero, eight-month winter eating rice and/or noodles every day. There are some days that you'd just rather forget about, to say the least.

The thing is that along with my day-to-day memory slipping away, I can also feel the asphalt of my long-term memory cracking under the pressure of all the memories it's been creating over my years of living abroad. So many of the people I've made those fantastic memories with aren't around to remind me of the fun we had and the amazing things we did. This also means that they're not around to make some new memories that would serve to add texture to the original few. Furthermore, those people who are around now will all leave at some point. At the moment, I feel rather like a rug that hasn't been and won't be properly tied. A lot of loose ends are starting to make the whole thing unravel and this concerns me. I see myself not learning from mistakes. I notice I talk a lot and yet do not always keep my word (often because I forgot what I had said!). It seems that I've become so used to existing in the moment that I've forgotten how to purposefully plan for the next phase using what knowledge I've gained from the past. This can't have good consequences. I can't help but wonder, "Has it been a mistake to live abroad alone this whole time?" 

So what can remedy my memory-loss situation? Even as I'm writing this, the sun is coming up over the buildings outside my window. Another day is beginning in Changchun and I'm struggling to remember what I did in the previous twenty-four hours. Didn't I just wake up? Yet, in another twelve hours, with hopefully some sleep in between, I will be teaching American line dances to Chinese undergraduates and today will feel like a vintage postcard. I can only hope someone wrote me some advice on the back before they posted it my way.