Chillin’ in Chile: Some ways living in Chile has made me more chill

Photo courtesy of Tyler Wright

“Chillin’ in Chile” is a popular catchphrase among English-speaking exchange students…y’know, because alliterations are clever. While I wouldn’t say that I’m a particularly uptight person to begin with (depending on whom you ask), I sometimes struggle with this thing called “chilling out.”

To illustrate this, let’s talk about this picture of me kayaking: I look happy because I’m doing this thing called a weekend-excursion-for-exchange-students-to-get-to-know-Chile-better and I’d just gotten in the river, not yet realizing how much my noodle arms were about to struggle. Basically what happened was, I couldn’t keep my kayak from spinning and almost flipped over because I was paddling with an incredibly frustrated determination to move forward. Eventually, I had to just take off my glasses so that I couldn’t see how far ahead of me everyone else was, and had to just be chill with the river’s currents.

Anyway, here are some other ways being in Chile has nudged me into chillness:

• Riding Micros. Micros are public buses. Micros have taught me to go with the flow of the universe because sometimes it’s 2 a.m. and your micro passes without stopping at your bus stop. Three times. Even though everyone at the stop is shouting and jumping up and down waving. You have no choice but to accept it and wait for the next one. Once you’re on said micro, you also have to go with the flow of the universe, a.k.a. centripetal force of gravity, because the bus is going really fast around sharp corners and the laws of physics just don’t permit anything otherwise.
• Being robbed. Twice. There’s something briefly liberating about getting your wallet/backpack with your only debit card stolen and thereby potentially losing all your access to capital and worldly materials. There’s even something minutely hilarious about it happening twice. Until you realize that you live in a capitalist society and you need that money to survive. But then it’s all okay because you file a fraud claim and your credit union gives you all your money back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Being kicked out of a class for the first time in my life. I take school really seriously and am fairly confident in my academic research skills. But Prof. Valdivia didn’t believe that I was capable of writing a 15-page research paper about the relationship between homophobic and anti-communist laws during the Cold War. So she passively aggressively strongly suggested that I take another class (or fail) even though it was after the add/drop date and she had not even seen my annotated bibliography yet! I literally cried in the coordinator for international students’ office, which was extremely embarrassing because, I know, it’s just a class. But it was a stark reminder that though my opportunities for upward social mobility and access to capital have almost always been tied to my ability to achieve in the institution of education, my value as a person is not necessarily tied to academic achievement.

• Being bad at everything and sleeping a lot. Everything is hard. Turning on the stove is hard. Finding the location of your classes is harder. Communicating and being social in Spanish is perhaps the hardest. Even buying a cone of ice cream to treat yourself during those especially hard days takes an extra step. The accumulation of constantly failing at little things really is mentally exhausting and naptime thus was re-introduced into my routine.

To clarify, I define chillness not as the absence of caring at all, but rather an approach to taking action that allows you the opportunity to see potential paths you might have not considered to be options before — be more adventurous, etc. I think being chill is a practical skill to have so that you don’t waste your energy fighting the flow when you can be working with the flow to get where you want to go. But being too chill can often lead to complacency and inaction; some people just don’t have the privilege to not worry, especially if their society’s flow is designed against them.

With that said, chillness, for me, is an attitude that’s highly influenced by the context of my surrounding environment. Ultimately, I recognize that my ability to sometimes be chill in Chile is partially a product of my being in a place where I can afford to “go with the flow” because I am considered transitory both legally and socially, and my stakes for survival are not wholly dependent my ability to “succeed” in Chilean society.