Understand

I have spent an entire week working on one abstract.
One bloody outline.
Of an argument that I just can't seem to lay out as a sweet logical little skeleton. Instead, the bones of the argument poke up every which way and every model collapses when I step back to take a look. And when I get so far inside my head I can hardly even bring myself to talk to other people for fear of shrieking at them. And I have somehow lost my confidence and become this O what if he doesn't like it person in relation to my supervisor, who is trying to help me find my way.

It's hard to imagine that doing practically nothing is so Hard. And I'm not dealing particularly well with the stress.

But I guess that’s why I’m here, after all. To learn how to do this kind of thinking, this kind of research—the effort to understand one another, from society to society, person to person, heart to heart. At the moment I want to say that it doesn't matter if we don't understand each other as long as we look after each other, and go running back to my development activist world—but how can we love each other if we do not understand one another? As I recall, we did some good and also some damage storming around where angels fear to tread. Maybe the damage would be lessened if we understood things a little better. Perhaps I am a bit of an intellectual after all. I am tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to write about why Khmer development workers are so ambivalent about change. And I am doing this because I want to understand.

And that reminded me of this quote by Baruch Spinoza that I used to bring myself back to in Cambodia, time and again, when living in another culture got hard:

Do not weep.
Do not wax indignant.
Understand.

I never followed it very well. I did a lot of weeping and a lot of waxing indignant. I still do. But I also have found myself on a journey that I think will never end--the journey to understand and then to translate that into writing--which is one kind of testimonio, bearing witness.

I need to see this world of academic writing as another kind of translation, another kind of testimonio, another search for understanding. Then it will perhaps become not only endurable, but a quest. And I like quests. Quests are exciting. Ride on, Quixote, to the endless line of windmills and the search for a life worth living! That sort of thing.