I’ll Be the Fool

The universe has a funny way of bringing physical representations of the lessons we need to grasp when we are otherwise struggling to understand them. By some manifestation of divine intervention, I have recently found myself revisiting pictures from my time spent in Colombia. Wandering around Colombia with my front-facing camera as my sole mode of documenting my time there, I’m reminded of how absolutely ridiculous I felt. My back camera, thanks to the false advertising of a phone case bought on the streets of Seoul and my very clumsy nature, was but an empty void with chips of broken glass. Most likely would’ve simply opted to go get their phone fixed and that would certainly make this story much shorter, but alas I’m me. Frugality shapes so many of my decisions, in part because I see the fleeting nature of our material possessions. Experiences, however, have always been an easy sell for me. Or that’s at least how I rationalized traveling to a foreign country with a phone that was by no means functioning to its fullest potential.

This mindset, of very much arbitrarily cherry-picking what deserves my literal two cents, has led to unintended innovation and compromises, as any of my friends will attest to. Quite honestly, it’s pushed me into looking ridiculous. I cite a selection of my experiences: like trying and failing miserably at a beer-chugging challenge in an attempt to get a free stay (at an already very cheap) hostel in Vietnam, the time I walked 4 miles to get home because there’s no way I’m paying for an Uber, or swapping clothes with a random girl in an alleyway in order to get into a concert in New York (a story for another time!). In Colombia, I could have easily fallen into the line of thinking that with a broken camera, taking photos was no longer a luxury I could take part in. In making this an allegory for life, photos could be substituted for plenty of other things we value. We hear no, and automatically assume we have exhausted all our options; that the extent of our story has been written for us to read over and over in painstaking agony.

I almost fell for this trap and then I stopped to take stock of my actual reality and not the woe is me one that can often feel so comfortable. It can be nice to overlook the things we have at times because it places responsibility outside of ourselves for the outcomes we face.

The truth was I had a camera, just my front-facing one. So all around Colombia: as we discovered the statues of Medillín’s Fernando Botero, trekked through the mountainside to bask in the glory of Cueva del Esplendor in Jardín, and tirelessly climbed the 740 steps of Piedra del Peñol, I contorted my hand in an effort to capture images, with varying degrees of accuracy. I couldn’t even see what I was taking a picture of, and I most definitely looked odd. However, in the act of trying I continue to create value, more so than I would have if I had simply chosen to fork over the money to my camera’s restoration. Something I supposedly lacked became something distinctly mine to cherish, and as I look at some (not all) of the photos I’m thankful I was able to capture the trip from my own perspective. That’s something I can never replicate or funnel any amount of money into.

Sometimes (and I’m obviously generalizing here) our setbacks and acceptance of being the odd one in the room can be a great gift. We begin to see things from new angles and appreciate the things we do have (like a phone that I subsequently lost). In research, we often see our limitations not as dead ends, but in actuality paths of exploration for future research. As long as my intentions are in the right place, I’ll settle with looking a little foolish over the alternative any day!