The Converse Theorem

The theory goes like this: you got to school; you get into university or land yourself with a job; you advance to a higher paying level, or you don’t. You keep working and earn enough money to take care of the 2.4 children you’ll produce and the taxes and mortgage and maybe a family trip every year or two. One day you’ll retire and do all the things that you truly wanted to do, but were out of line with The Theory, thereafter, all the “special parts” of you will somehow move on as the body that carried you through life is buried in a moderately fancy box 6 feet under.

This is a solid theory. It has been tried and tested through the ages, showing varying degrees of success, with just a few drawbacks. Firstly, happiness and content has more often than not been pushed passed second place on the list of important things to take care of. Secondly, many bite the dust before they get to enjoy the sweet fruits of their life’s labour, or that labour was simply not enough. This shows that by setting their desires aside to work in order to grasp those desires later on, they did not truly live.

The purpose of having a Theory is to help people to decide what to do with all the time they have been given with their lives. Success of The Theory comes when a person is shown to have lived. The idea that one should work up to living for the majority of one’s time and then still may not succeed, seems like too much of a risk to me. This is why I’m proposing an alternative; a compromise with reality and real life, if you will. This will be known as The Converse Theorem.

The Converse Theorem is the plan to live life – also known as acting on one’s true desires – whenever the opportunity makes itself apparent, and not only at a late stage and all at once. It is based off of the acknowledgement of time and a clear view of it in retrospect of one’s important desires. Education and work are both still respectively ideals and necessary, yet the chronological order in which they occur in The Theory is not a necessity. Mixing of necessity and desire simultaneously or one after the other is therefore the basis of The Converse Theorem.

An example of how The Converse Theorem could work is this: one works and then travels, and then studies and then works, or does all three all at once. One could work in a field of interest for a while before working in another field of interest. In this way, desires and necessities are met simultaneously earlier on in life, and can be experienced for a longer, stretched out period of time, where all of it combined contributes to one’s growth as a human being.

The Theory arose at a time where people searched for stability and a set plan, after times of the exact opposite, such as WWII. This set plan was set up along with the white picket fences, powerfully stereotypical and usually sexist advertising, and considerably smaller population with considerably higher job security. These are not the ‘things’ that the people, young and old, of today seek out.  Many people find themselves stuck in the pit that they manage to tread for themselves by walking over the same ground for years and years in the same job, in the same house, in the same country, surrounded by the same people; and as any trapped animal would, they become frantically frightened, pitifully panicked, or just straight up depressed; or at least daunted by the idea that this is the future set out for them, not knowing that there is an acceptable alternative to this. Not knowing that there is another way to move forward, where one can tread one’s own path different to the accepted norm, is a dangerous ignorance of opportunity in a world brimming with newly discovered paths every day. We need to be brave enough to explore them. If something works, why discount it?  The world today cannot afford to any longer.

Peruvian People

"On the outside the house is clean, because we do the dishes indoors."

I'm trying to figure out exactly what it is about Peruvians, or South Americans in general, that makes them so different to the rest of the Earth's populace. It is a quality that you find in each person's soul upon knowing them for at most five minutes, and it is something that makes it very easy for me to want to spend more and more time in their presence. Taking the easy way out one would simply say, "It's their passion!" and while this is obviously a part of it, it's not the whole story. The quote above is the gist of a saying told to me by a new friend, Roderigo, and I think it plays a large part in this South American 'quality' that I'm trying to put my finger on. Peruvians keep going no matter what. Through illness, sadness, hardships, windy days, or family quarrels, keeping energised, busy and having fun is key. Some could think that this determination to move forward produces a superficial society, especially in Lima, but this train of thought is not well thought out, because it is in the small quips of time and fast conversation between the raging push forward that I have found out the beauty and depth of South American people. The idea is that people deal with whatever is on their minds within themselves, because their problems are not their entire reason for existence. When people don't make their problems everyone else's, there is a lot more time to get to know them as a person - and in true South American fashion - have fun. So in the midst of the fast pace of life here, the fast speak, traffic, hand gestures, judgements, all of it, you get to a solitary moment with a new friend where they share something about themselves with you that lets you into their world, and then as abruptly as it started it ends and you keep moving forward with only one difference, you have gained one more person to ride the tidal wave of South American society with.

Another thing that contributes to this South American persona is the strength that family holds here. Although family life may be trumped by 21st century living, the idea that your family is most important sets in place the mindset that, first of all, you take care of the people who you hold close to you, and second of all, you can be confident with any endeavour in your life and personality because you know that you'll have your "family" to support you. As a friend and traveller, falling in the midst of these kinds of people gives you the protection that family would. You are taken care of and the people around you inspire you to be confident enough with yourself and your taken path to enjoy yourself in your surroundings.

The last, and most important thing, is their obvious passion. This paired with their almost nationalistic love for their country makes for a powerful yet dangerous combination. On the one hand, their passion is contagious and is anything but discrete, which is a great quality in my eyes because you will always know what a South American thinks or their opinion on a matter. You find yourself inclined to agree that Peruvian food is the best food and it's the most beautiful country and it has the best sunsets! On the other hand, this passion can be blinding; blinding from the beauty of the rest of the world and from the need to grow outward and develop as a nation. But this problem stretches much farther than any thought in my 1 month in Peru should encompass.

Intro.

On my 18th birthday I will have been alive for 6570 days. Out of those I should have been present in an institutionalized education facility for 2448 days. In 2011 I was given the opportunity to go to Peru on an exchange program. Up until that tender age of 15 I had not travelled out of Africa since ten years before. I expected so much from my experience that I didn't receive, yet was gifted with so much from it that I never could have thought possible. New sights, new smells, new tastes, new sounds, new friends, and most importantly, new knowledge. the travel bug hadn't just bitten me, it had infected me from head to toe and every day that I sat in a classroom it felt like if I didn't get up, run out the door and fly straight away to anywhere else the bug would spread consume me limb by limb. I've learnt so much inside the four walls of a classroom that I will be ever grateful for, but when I think of the amount I learnt and gained in just two and a half months 10 000 km away in another place, I find myself questioning whether or not it was worth it, or the right place for me. The knowledge that so much more to learn lay within travelling and life experience outside of those walls and the hundreds of pages in all the textbooks has become too much for me to bear. This is the main reason that I have decided to spend one year travelling.

I am picking up where I left off almost three years ago: Peru. From there I will go to Colombia and stay in the capital city Bogota for five months, hopefully picking up a lot of Spanish and a reasonsble amount of cash to fund the rest of my trip. From Colombia I will cross the  Darién Gap by boat to Panama, from there I will be catching buses through Costa Rica (a visit to the Sloth sanctuary is definitely in order), Nicaragua, El Salvador, to Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, then on to Cancun, Mexico where I will meet up with my family for a few days. From Cancun I will make my way up to the USA and meet up with a friend and road trip from LA to Seattle, catching a bus from Seattle to Vancouver for two months. Along the way I hope to be staying on organic farms and learning a thing or two about this way of life.

I have 19 days left until I leave the West Coast of South Africa for the West Coast of the Americas. I am writing this more to prove to myself that I can do it and to remember my trip by, but for anyone who reads it I hope I can carry this story across with words and photographs as it means everything to me. And if anyone who does read this has any advice for a young, wide-eyed traveller, please don't hesitate to throw it my way. One more hisory exam and then the journey begins.