Aku rindu…musim salju

I can truthfully say I don’t often miss things, here. I have all of my daily needs more than satisfactorily met. I live in a beautiful room in a beautiful house, I eat good food and as much fresh fruit as I want, and I’m blessed to have been welcomed into a wonderful, warm community. I get to be barefoot basically whenever*, and I get a guaranteed two more years of not having to work in an office. There are lots of other good things I could list off, too, but these are some big ones that first come to mind, in terms of everyday comforts.

[*I don’t think I’ve brought this up before, but this country is a barefoot-lover’s haven. Students regularly walk around school barefoot (though at the last school assembly there was an announcement discouraging them from doing this); children and adults alike roam the community with no shoes, including men at work in the fields or engaged in other manual labor; kicking off your shoes to rest your feet just about anywhere, including something like a staff meeting, is completely acceptable; and many professional rooms, or places like the school library, require you to take off your shoes before entering, to keep the place clean. I’ve always loved being barefoot, and I love this. I don’t, however, go outside barefoot, because people in my particular social niche (mid-twenties, still-single female) tend not to, and the ground is very rocky and would hurt.]

Sure, I often think wistfully of the Pacific Northwest and all the things I love about it, but I’m content to be here. Also, when I lapse into some daydream about strolling around Seattle and settling in for lunch at some swanky restaurant, the vision falls flat fast when inevitably my imagination strays to prices. When I do finally return to the U.S., that sticker shock is going to hit me good and hard, starting right off with obscenely marked-up airport food.

I do miss my family, but I’ll see them soon enough, and we talk on the phone often. I love when we’re together, but I’m okay with us being apart. I miss peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on bread. (I love bread.) I really miss animals, especially my pets—I’ll never get over missing them. I miss being alone in nature, and I miss silence.

Lately I’ve been missing winter.

I’ve often told the story of how being an exchange student in Slovakia during an epic winter there—which also coincided with my hardest time emotionally, and certain cultural elements such as no heating at school and a tendency to keep the windows open—felt like a traumatic experience. In the years after, I faced the oncoming winter with a deep-seated, visceral dread. Fall was fun, and who couldn’t love the first snowfall; but I knew as soon as Christmas was over there would still be another two, maybe three or four, months of gloom and hibernation.

If given the chance to live in, say, Northern California for a couple years, maybe for graduate school, I would have jumped at the chance for perpetual pleasant weather. It’s not something I’ve ever known, growing up in the rainforest around Puget Sound. And I’ve long recognized how much more healthy, cheery, and productive I am when the sun is out. Even if a gray, downpour of a day can be cozy, the meaning of “cozy” is I’m tucked into bed watching a movie with popcorn and my cat, not running errands around town, going for a bike ride, cleaning the house or taking my dogs for a long walk on the beach.

In thinking about countries I was interested in for Peace Corps, I knew I couldn’t handle one of the Eastern European/Central Asian countries. Winter is brutal enough at lower latitudes, even with central heating and heated water guaranteed. I’ve never been a huge hot-weather person, either, meaning that I wilt at around 75 degrees, but I figured I’d rather sweat for two years than have to go through two or three winters that were sure to be much worse than what I’d experienced as a teenager in Central Europe.

To my everlasting luck, I wound up with the best of both worlds. I was placed in a “cold” site here in West Java, which means I’m up in the hills where it’s perpetually foggy and doesn’t get hotter than 85 degrees. At night it gets down to 65, and I always sleep with my windows open to enjoy it, tucked under a thick, polar-fleece blanket. For some contrast, in Kediri, where we had our pre-service training, I lay in bed at night without any kind of covers, unable to sleep because I was so hot and completely drenched in sweat, eagerly anticipating morning when I would be able to get up and throw cold water over myself. (In all fairness, it’s true that I didn’t use the fan my host family provided. My goal was to try to toughen myself up, since I thought this would be my reality for the next two years. Syke!) In Kediri, I’d look forward all day to coming home to bathe with cold water and getting to not feel so sticky and gross for a half an hour until the sweating started up again. Here at my permanent site, I’m blessed with a shower water heater, and on the mornings when it doesn’t work, it’s just as miserable as your accidental cold showers are at home.

The rainy season, one of only two seasons known to Java, has been in effect since mid-October. Usually what this means is that the morning starts off eye-achingly bright and hot, and then by mid-morning the clouds start rolling in; by noon the sky is uniformly gray; early afternoon things start getting unnaturally dark, and you wonder if it’s later than the clock says; and then around 2 p.m. the downpour suddenly breaks, and lasts about three hours. By evening things are dripping, but stable, and at night the clouds begin to clear again, to the extent that you might have a starry sky. This is the usual twelve-hour cycle. Sometimes, though, it’ll be dark and gray with almost constant pouring for a day or three at a time. These times have made me remember, and appreciate, the usually fine weather, especially the endless sunshine of the “dry” (in Indonesian, panas, “hot”) season. I don’t mind the rain, and it keeps the air fresh, but even one all-rain day sees me staying sluggish, feeling entitled to do nothing but sit around with a movie or a book, rather than sunny weather, which compels me to get up early and just go hike a mountain already!

Also in defense of little seasonal variation: I only need outfits for one kind of weather, and never, ever have to run through the mental considerations of dressing in layers. The only thinking-ahead required is remembering to always bring my raincoat with me. Every day I know it will be hot, exactly as hot as it always is, unless I get lucky, and then it’ll be cool enough that I don’t sweat. There have been exactly six times here in Indonesia when I was certifiably cold, but these fell into three categories of incidence: journeying to a high elevation, like a mountaintop; riding in overnight trains between West and East Java, where the cars are refrigerated to as low as 60 degrees with air conditioning; and being soaked from swimming fully clothed and then forced to stay in those wet clothes for hours outside in the rain. I will never be cold from the weather itself here at my “cold” site, and I’ve come to find this deep-seated assurance comforting. It’s something I’ve never had living anywhere else.

And still I’ve found myself missing winter.

Maybe it’s a desire for discontent, to always want what you don’t have. Maybe it’s just missing the holiday festivities of my favorite time of the year, that magical month from Thanksgiving to Christmas. (Why haven’t corporations trademarked some buzzword for this time span yet? “The holiday season”—pff, they can think of something snappier, I’m sure, while still being inclusive of many holiday traditions.) I just glanced down at the little calendar icon on my computer desktop and with a jerk of shock, as if I realized I’m lucid dreaming, saw it’s two days until Christmas. Christmas right now feels something like snow: I know it’s happening to lots of people, including many I know and love; but it’s so totally separate from my experience, I can’t really believe it’s going to feature in it.

Just as living in South America messed with my subjective (and, I swear, bodily) sense of time, with trees shedding brown leaves in March to bitter chill through all of June, living in the Tropics with perfect temperature stability leaves me with no marking of time. I try to make sense of the passing months by mapping them onto the Northern Hemisphere seasonal churnings—I got here in spring, and now it’s winter—or by comparing it to my time in Argentina (I got there in March, I left in late December). But still, the only thing that I think will really convince me that time has passed will be the arrival of Ramadhan in May. I know there’s an irony to that, given that Ramadhan occurs at a different time each year relative to the Western calendar, but actually, for me, it’ll be the first anniversary of something occurring outside of myself. When March 12 comes around, marking one whole year I’ll have been here in Indonesia, it’ll only have the artificial significance I personally assign to it. Ramadhan, though, was a real event that happened to everyone, and Ramadhan will be repeated, which will mean my time here will have made one full rotation through.

Recently I was staying at a hotel in Surabaya, in East Java, for a committee meeting. The hotel had a strung-out Christmas tree up, wrapped presents around its base, twinkling lights up on the wall, nonstop Christmas music playing, and (probably Muslim?) staff wearing Santa hats. The decorations and general air of festivity weren’t so jarring for the reason they should have been, namely that these are Western hallmarks in a Muslim-majority country (there’s a significant Christian minority here, too, but I feel pretty sure that Santa hats are not a homegrown, Indonesian-Christian tradition). Instead, they kept throwing me off because otherwise I had forgotten about Christmas entirely. One of my fellow Volunteers who was there for the meeting too was planning on going straight from our get-together to home for Christmas. That was an equally mind-blowing thought: as if Christmas were a place you could travel to for a visit, that certainly existed over there, even if I had grave doubts about its reality here. (Later, having arrived in New England, she sent me a picture of a dark, snowy farm in her neighborhood. I couldn’t believe the image was one that someone I had just spoken to in Indonesia was experiencing firsthand. It felt like a foreign artifact I could glance over with an outsider’s interest, like a magazine piece on Russians who go ice-diving in December.)

While my time so far in Indonesia has now been almost exactly the length I was in Argentina, the big difference between sunbathing in December in 95 degree heat in Buenos Aires and waking up to another blisteringly-bright sun west of Bandung is that a year ago I knew—and was very much eagerly anticipating—that I was headed home to a cold winter. The prospect of winter didn’t scare me then, because it was guaranteed to be brief (I was heading off to steamy Indonesia in March, after all), and because I was craving some return to the clockwork of Northern Hemisphere seasons. Reversed seasons in the Southern Hemisphere had disoriented me the entirety of the ten months I was there.

This time around, I’m not going home. To be honest, the strangeness of the progression of time here is such that if I were given a free ticket to Seattle tomorrow, I’d be happy, but with an unshakeable feeling of being undeserving. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here long enough (certainly not that I’ve done enough) to merit a home tour. Pre-service training is a blip of time that was cut off from any recognition of having been lived even before it was over; the long summer months before school got underway compress into about five days. No wonder it only feels like four months. It does feel like I arrived here in September.

Even referring to some metrics which should be more objective, like the fact that I came here not speaking Indonesian (or Sundanese), and now I do, doesn’t do much to break the surreal vibe. In music we use dynamics, the rising of the crescendo that builds up to something; but with no terminus in sight, what do I build up to? With no external marking of the seasons, when do I check in, register that time has passed, gauge how far along I feel I should be or take stock of how far I’ve come? It’s a very strange thing.

Another weird thing about there being no winter, is if you get depressed, you have nothing to possibly excuse it by. Negative feelings are guaranteed if you spend enough time in a foreign country, especially if you’re in an immersive environment. You might manage to avoid initial culture shock, but I think culture fatigue is unavoidable. (This isn’t a real term that I know of, but believe me, it’s real.) It’s a generalized malaise that comes and goes with devastating randomness, like a shingles flare-up, and while it’s certainly caused by living abroad for an extended period of time, it can’t be mapped to specific daily occurrences. You might try to point out to yourself that someone said something annoying to you, and thus your intense feelings of irritation at the whole world have a clear and reasonable justification; but just as likely, no one says anything, and you just feel irritated because you do.

I’ve always charted my emotional tides to the seasonal calendar. Although I never thought of myself as officially having S.A.D., I operated as if I did: I dreaded winter because it was synonymous with depression, and I considered bad feelings in the coldest months as just inextricable part and parcel of the turning of the wheel of the year. I never looked forward to a descent into darkness, but I didn’t resent it too dearly, either, because there was a big-picture balance to it all that felt like fairness. Spring always brought with it the promise of unparalleled emotional highs. There’s no ecstasy like a clear blue sky on a February morning, sunshine through still-bare trees refulgent with promise. I may have had my worst winter in Slovakia, but I’ll never have a purer spring than that one, either. It’s as Aristotle wrote: there’s far more pleasure to be had in moving from an unpleasant state to a neutral one than moving from a neutral one to a pleasant one. Being brought back from the brink of frostbite is better than a warm bubble bath on an average Tuesday afternoon. How much more pleasurable, then, to go from certifiably unpleasant to certifiably wonderful?

Long before coming here I did spare a thought for what it might be like to live somewhere with not just reversed seasons, as in Argentina, but no seasons at all, at least temperature-wise. I wondered: Without an external seasonal dial switching my emotions up or down, would I just be stable, neutral? Or if it were sunny all the time, would I feel emotionally that I was running through an endless field of plump spring crocuses, “the hills are alive with the sound of music!”, not a care in the world? I was curious for what would happen in an environment outside of what I considered to be the natural ebb and flow of things. It would be a new experiment.

The year has yet to fully run its course, but I’ve come to some conclusions. I think the sunshine does keep me more up than gray weather would, and I can’t imagine how I would be faced with real winter now. But there’s still culture fatigue to contend with, which means the lows are inevitable, even if they’re just as unconnected to what’s actually going on in my life as cold weather would be. Thanks to culture fatigue, I experience the strange alien feeling of being depressed on sunny, objectively-beautiful days. Somehow, although it’s equally irrational, it feels more acceptable to pin moods on the weather, pointing to a cloudy sky as if it provides the irrefutable explanation: “I want to crawl under my covers and stay there for the next two days and I have no motivation to do anything and I can’t think about future goals and possibilities because it’s dreary.”

Without winter to blame, I sometimes blame myself. That’s also not a good strategy, though. Because ultimately I do realize that whatever depression I’m momentarily given over to is also, as I’ve said, not really connected to my personal emotional life. It’s contextual. Living abroad for a long time takes its toll, and that’s okay, provided you recognize negative feelings for what they are and manage not to internalize them. Freaking out over their implications, listening to all the unpleasant things that get stirred up from ruminating, and spiraling deeper, is unproductive, unhelpful, and unnecessary. Winter or not, I’ve been through all this before, many times over, in many different experiences living abroad. I know the only strategies that are healthy and do reliably work are staying active, finding channels of distraction, refusing to engage with negative thoughts, and remembering that this too shall pass, as it always does.

Maybe later on my winterless experience here will give me a new view on what I’ve always seen as my powerlessness to the will of the seasons. If I can be feel low in eternal summer, what’s to say I can’t stay upbeat in the throes of winter? Another experiment to try sometime.

Sure, it’s always easier to miss in absentia. But since I don’t have to deal with the consequences of my wishfulness, I’ll end where I started and say I do miss winter and all the complexities of a four-season yearly emotional journey, even as I’m thankful for my temporary, 27-month foray into summerland. As I’m still disbelieving that December 25 will mean anything to me, but also fantasizing about arctic wildernesses given over to snow and ice, which I’m wont to do every six months or so, enjoy this wonderful piece that captures the spirit of the season for me every year: