If you have been here for a while, it is not news how much curiosity matters to me. Both personally as a key driver of everything I do, and as a way of operating in the world, especially when things feel hard. My go-to: let’s get curious. A second pillar for me, and many of us, is service. There is a desire to serve, to ensure that we do something that is bigger than ourselves and in support of others and their own lives. But before my discussion with Erick Gonzales Rocha, our latest guest in Lucky to Be Here, I had not thought about them separately. I am very appreciative for the gift he gave me with this.
Erick is a development economist born and raised in Cochabamba, Bolivia, who moved to Japan as an international student and earned his Ph.D. from Kobe University. After building her academic career post-graduation in Japan, he moved to Geneva, Switzerland where he currently lives with his wife and works as an international public officer in international organizations.
During our conversation, we discussed the experience of becoming an international student and all that it took for Erick, including figuring out what fellowships and scholarships were available across countries before we could even Google them. He shares his experiences of traveling from Cochabamba to La Paz to start that research, and from there, his big move to Japan where he lived for over a decade. We also talked about the different emotional experiences and culture shocks, first from the move from Bolivia to Japan, but then also as he continued to grow on his own and was faced with a very different environment when he moved to Switzerland. That move had plenty of big changes, including getting married and navigating a cultural environment that did not feel as comfortable to his personality. He speaks directly to some of the wounds a lot of us carry with us over the years, especially when we deal with interactions and environments where we feel we are not welcomed or our belonging is questioned.
But as I mentioned before, another gift this conversation with me gave me was to think about the distinction between curiosity and desire. Early on in our conversation, he shares how his motivation for exploring education abroad was not curiosity as much as a desire to serve, to learn through other cultures and experiences how he could serve back home and beyond. For someone like me, who is driven by both in equal measures, the idea that your curiosity could be driven by the desire to act on addressing a problem first was revelatory.
Today, as much as I encourage you to listen to this episode, where Erick also shares some of the books and authors that speak to him (including a poem by C. P. Cavafy that I also love and share below), I want to invite you to ponder on these questions:
What is your relationship with curiosity and desire? Does one lead the way? How?
I continue to ponder on this myself, and while we are at it, I share this lovely poem by Cavafy that Erick mentions on this link, published by the Poetry Foundation. This poem is called Ithaka, and there are a few things I love about this one (and if you are interested in a more fleshed out exploration of it, let me know and I’ll share one with you in my Arenero). But the one that stands out in this exploration is that Ithaka is not a destination, but rather the exploration. In a sense, Ithaka is the desire that leads to the curiosity along the way. [Side note: for another great reference to Ithaca, check out our latest episode of The Poetry Nook where I read Ars Poetica, a poem by Jorge Luis Borges.]
I look forward to reading your thoughts and insights,