East Timor Notebook: What is a full life?

25 June 2007
Dili

What is a full life? Pessoa argues that one should abdicate from life, otherwise abdicate from one’s self. To belong to something is banal. Creed, ideal, wife, profession: prison cells, shackles.

I gallop in the opposite direction. I feel mortality closing in on me and race to fill my life with ideals, with living out my dreams, with pursuits of grandeur, with turning my hobbies into passions. Because it is an effort, there is a skein of falsehood in this attempt. And yet, how can it not be an effort? How can I not push myself to achieve more, to travel farther, and to fill, fill, fill the pages of my notebooks and screens with the words and evidence of the density of my life.

I can’t pause. I can’t stand still. I’m a motor that is constantly running.

Last week, EC tender.
These two weeks, election observer mission in East Timor.
After that, Chiaroscuro.

And now, I am alone with Pessoa’s coffee cup and cigarette, following the blinking cursor to the next thought.

Traveling to Dili was like travelling to any destination I’d gone to before. Sitting here and typing on my iBook, alone in the living room, is no different from staying up until the wee hours of the morning, doing the same thing with Gabby and Junior sound asleep upstairs at home.

Thirty years and I still can’t tell you the meaning of my life.

I’ve tried so hard to be independent, need no one, touch nothing; but without the love and friendship of the people around me, I’d be bereft and forlorn.

I need to be liked, I need to be loved. Respect and admiration are food for the craven soul.

From needing to be the good girl, as a child, I’ve grown to needing to be a great person.

I wish I could write, right now, about all my mundane observations in coming to Dili for the first time. Is this the Dili of my dreams? In that, Pessoa was right: nothing in reality could ever be as good as their versions in our imagination, in the ether where there exists only two: you and your thoughts.

Dili was familiar territory because I’m always carrying around the same baggage of who I am. There is nothing alien about the wide, empty highways and the small, uneven streets, littered with the rubble of 25 years of Indonesia’s brutal military occupation.

You don’t see it in the wide, smiling eyes of the women and children. Children play in the street, scattered by the occasional big vans with “UN” emblazoned on them. They play soccer and own the road. They laugh and practice English on me and on any foreigner they see, probably. They grab at the US dollars of my guilt for being a thousand times more affluent than them. They sing and dance and link hands with you and step forward, step back. Maubere, they sing, man, woman, stand up for Timor Loro’sae.