Have We Anything Resembling a Plan?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, January 17, 2007)

“I never planned anything in my life.” – Lucas ‘Luke’ Jackson (Paul Newman) in the 1967 movie ‘Cool Hand Luke’

Anyone who has built or renovated a house in Indonesia is probably not surprised that planes fall out of the sky and ferries break up and sink with alarming frequency – not to equate a villa builder’s frustration at crooked tiles and paint smudges on the woodwork with the death that can come with hurried maintenance checks and lackadaisical enforcement of carrying capacities.

But the two areas are not unrelated, and when discussing either safety or construction, Westerners often resort to the use of “they”, meaning collectively the people living in the country surround them: “They” don’t care enough to do it right, not like “we” do it. “They” don’t think in the long-term, whereas “we” always act with foresight approaching the clairvoyant. “They” don’t think precisely, while “we” never resort to fuzzy numbers and back-of-the-envelope figuring.

What strikes me in my calmer moments these days – when I am not apoplectic over a poorly fitted window or random placement of bathroom fixtures – is how Western “we” expatriates remain, sometimes after decades living away from home, and how Indonesians and Asians, to “us”, seldom become more than the outside “other”. We choose – dispensing with the quotation marks – for one reason or another to live in Bali, and yet the majority of us refuse to live like the Balinese. We want Western-style kitchens, Western-style bathrooms, Western-style beds, and no chickens scratching in the garden – not stopping to ask if Bali would have the same drawing power and attraction if everyone, Balinese included, lived in villas and Western-style homes, shopped for groceries at supermarkets, and bought all home maintenance supplies at Ace.

Looking over some of my 19th-century travel histories – such as Alfred R. Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago – it is surprising how easily some supposedly uptight Victorian English (admittedly not common travelers) adapted to living in two-room bamboo shacks. In days of different hygienic standards, when draft and small farm animals still roamed and shat in the streets of all major cities, and when people in Western countries still did their own ‘business’ in out buildings, it was probably easier for them to adjust to living among the ‘heathen’. The main practical – as opposed to social and cultural – adjustments would have been in accepting flimsier building construction and a different diet. Personal ablutions, for instance, would have been only slightly different, perhaps more exposed, in the days before widespread indoor plumbing, and most everyday, non-specialist technology would have been familiar, if possibly from a not-too-distant past.

The Western world has come ‘far’ since then, to the point where American and European homes are so free of ordinary germs and bacteria that some doctors blame weaker immune systems and more common allergies on defense systems hardly ever tested by household dirt; to where every product comes with at least one warning, even if it is only to advise not to eat the wrappings; where children and many adults have little idea of the origin of foods beyond the freezer section of their local warehouse superstore; and where – so far from living in the moment – insurance, palmtops, actuarial tables, and risk analysis help us to prepare for every contingency we can think of and even some we can’t.

Americans and Europeans are living in the twenty-first century and striving for the twenty-second, while much of the rest of the world is stuck in the first half of the twentieth, if not further behind. We are peoples in love with precision and exactness and cleanliness – except in our rebel movie heroes – which is a good thing when dealing with planes, trains, and automobiles, among other things. But it is not such a good thing in other areas, mostly because the only hard edges in life – other than the difference between life and death – are the ones that we make and impose.

Life beyond timetables and connectivity is dirty and coarse and played by rule of thumb and seat of pants, or should be, if we would only let it. There is a sort of karmic lesson in the Westerner who comes to build a dream home in the Bali paradise and then waxes wroth for a year, browbeating workers and contractors and driving himself to drink fixating on minor flaws.

Paradise may not be so much about the perfectly ideal as about letting go of any idea of the perfect and accepting things as they are. It’s certainly a good lesson to learn in dealing with people, and it may make villa building less stressful for owner and worker … as long as we can be sure flipping a light switch won’t electrocute us and the first 4.0 earthquake won’t bring the roof down on our heads. But that’s the department of our new BA colleague, Phil Wilson, in Fixed Abode. I just wish he had started writing before I got my own renovation project underway.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi