Someone else's shoes

I'm reading a book right now about this custom among the Amish: adolescents spend a few years of their teendom living like "English" teens. If you caught the reality show "Amish in the City" on UPN a couple of years ago, you have an idea what this is all about. Although the Amish youth cast on the show to live in a house with non-Amish youth led relatively conservative experimental lives (at least on camera). Apparently, many of the kids spend a lot of time trying on drugs, drink, sex and the like for size. While not all Amish teens go that far outside the bounds of ordnung, this time spent living an Amish-alternative life is basically encouraged, since Amish believe folks aren't ready to make the final decision for baptism and "joining church" until they are adults, and know enough about life outside the faith to make a fully informed decision. It's fascinating to me that people whose lives are intentionally lived wholly separately from the everyday world most of us know can encourage their young to go out and spend a few years courting the devil himself. Some in rumspringa return to their Amish lives and families. Some don't. They find new lives and ways.

I've always been intrigued by the thought of living other lives. Growing up in SoCal in the 70s and early 80s, my friends were as likely to have been born in Pusan or Guatemala City as they were to have come from more local environs. Which always gave me a burning desire to know what it's like to think and speak in some other language, eat duk for an after-school snack, and have early childhood memories of exotic (to me) landscapes. It sparked an intense interest in language(s) and travel that I may never fulfill. Even learning other languages and going to other places couldn't give me what I really wanted, which was to know what it means to be "other" than myself.

I spent my college years in Berkeley, which was definitely the fire to my SoCal fryng pan. An explosion of experiences and opportunities, none of which (I regret to say) focused much on the actual academic stuff. Nonetheless, that's where my eyes were opened to my political self, and where I indulged my social appetites far beyond the boundaries most would have set for me.

Now that I'm pushing forty (I'll get there in December!), the potential other lives still beckon, but they are tempered by much more quotidien desires. Growing old with hubby, having my family and good friends nearby, and wanting (somewhat desperately) to have a child figure highest now on my list. I can look back and see lots of forks in lots of roads that would have determined completely different futures. And I still wonder.