Acclimation
Adaption to a physical or cultural environment
13.07.2008 - 19.07.2008
20 °C
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Asia '08
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There is an old adage among gamblers: "Play hand you're dealt, not the hand you wish you had." Or, it's possible that's not an old adage; I may have made it up -- I can't remember. If it's not an old adage, it should be, so please pass it along to any degenerate gamblers you might know. Anyway, it expresses a great deal of wisdom... In life, we always have to adjust our attitudes to the reality in which we find ourselves rather than pretending the situation is what we wish it was.
Life does, after all, have a tendency to throw curve balls.
Today, for example, I am writing from the sound booth at the theater during a matinee performance of Pride and Prejudice, the play that I have directed.
Prior to opening the theater to the audience, we had a photo session to take pictures of the production. I had a list of 20 I wanted to take, but I was only able to take half of them because of a miscommunication: one of the actresses sent her dress home with the costumer for laundering, and neither she nor I remembered to tell her that we needed it back earlier than normal. So now, I am going to have to take more photos before tomorrow's performance.
This is the kind of little readjustment that takes place on a daily basis in all of our lives. The bigger the event, the greater the readjustment that is required. It's one of the laws of the universe, I suppose.
As travellers, we often talk of acclimation: getting used to different physical or cultural surroundings. A mountain climber, for example, needs to rest at stages of elevation to allow the body to acclimate to the different level of oxygen. Sometimes we experience "culture shock" when we first arrive in an unfamiliar place and have to adjust to a different way of doing things. In China, for example, I have read that there is no such thing as an orderly queue to get on a train; all ticket holders just push their way on in a fashion that would be unthinkably rude to the Westerner. I'm sure there will be plenty of experiences like that on our trip.
And then, there is the tendency of the unexpected to happen when we travel. One of the more memorable nights of my travels during college was when an Italy-bound train pulled into the station at Lausanne, Switzerland, where I was waiting in the middle of the night with my friend Julie. When I attempted to board it, I found that I had somehow missed that it was sleeper cars only and I had no reservation. So, after a brief and fruitless attempt at sleeping on a wooden bench in the waiting area, we spent the remainder of the night in the 24-hour coffee shop. Wound up being quite interesting; we started talking with some girls from a Catholic boarding school who gave us a great insight into the mind of European youth at the time. It wasn't so fun being up all night at the time, but as is so often the case it made for a great memory.
Readjustment has been on our minds this week. After posting last Sunday that we had a buyer for our house, the deal fell through. The woman turned out to have lied to her lender about her finances, and had extremely unrealistic expectations about the discount she could expect for not considering our air conditioning system sufficient for her tastes. Now, our A/C is a little underpowered for the size of the house since we had the upstairs finished, and it can be a little warm up there. But the system works, and we did not feel it was our responsibility to pay for the equipment to give her the climate she desired. She didn't have the ability to acclimate, so the deal is dead.
And that is requiring a huge attitude readjustment on our part. We now have to accept that we are not going to have our house sold before we leave, and it's going to have to happen by proxy while we are gone. This is an unpleasant bit of stress to carry along with us, and it will make it harder to enjoy ourselves. But it could always be worse; at least we found out about the finances before closing and have time to make arrangements. We still know that God has a plan for us and isn't going to leave us hanging, but we sure feel like we're a lot closer to the edge than we'd like to be.
He always makes things interesting. We just need to acclimate.
Posted by Bwinky 14:28 Archived in USA Tagged preparation Comments (0)