Aceptando Ayuda, With Love...

So it’s been a while without an update.  And I’ve been pretty bad at writing emails, too.  Sorry about that.  I have an excuse!  And a good one, too.  I’m getting ready to spend three months in a Guatemalan jungle with 250 children. 

It’s funny, because it sounds like a joke, but it’s not.

Getting myself prepared for my summer plans has actually turned up quite a few more challenges than I thought it would.  But now that I think about it, it’s kind of a miracle there haven’t been even more.   I want you to imagine something: you are going to the jungle for three months.  You need to buy certain supplies that are not commonly needed in every part of the world (super-strength insect repellent, for example).  You need injections and malaria pills, and you need to decide what to bring to a place where you will have no electricity, no hot water, millions of animals and critters, and no department store just up the road.  Got it in your head?  Now do it while living in an Eastern European country where you have the language skills of the average 2-year-old, at best.  Not that I’m complaining.  It’s actually been a bit of an adventure already.  And it’s given me the chance to let other people help me, and therefore made me appreciate some of the people in my life even more.

There have been several friends who have offered me help with their encouraging words, assistance with Spanish, priceless advice, phone calls to friends to get information, etc.  I hope you know who you are, and that I’ve thanked you enough.  Some of you have quite simply been life rafts on days when I’ve been scared and felt lost. 

There is, however, one person I simply can’t thank enough, so I want to mention her by name.  Natalia, who works at Bell as one of the administrators, is, to use a Spanish expression I just learned, un alma de Dios.  (This is a person who is incredibly kind and for whom there can be no harsh words.)  When I told her what I was doing, she went straight to her computer and her telephone and started asking everyone she could think of what kinds of vaccines I needed and where I could go to get them.  She got the people at medicus to order the rabies vaccine specially for me, and when my doctor was lecturing me for not knowing exactly how many malaria pills I would need, Natalia spoke to her on the phone and made it better.  When I overpaid at the doctor,  she took care of everything again.  I’m pretty sure I would’ve quit halfway through the medical process if I hadn’t had her to help me.  Now I’m one rabies shot away from being vaccinated, and just waiting on a package from England with my malaria pills in it.

With just over three and a half weeks to go before the “real” adventure begins, I’m sure I’ll be pretty busy right up until the moment I get on the plane.  I’m sure I’ll be some combination of scared, excited, stressed, and humbled.  And I’m sure I’ll keep being touched by what wonderful people I know (and in fact, some I don’t know – I’ve been helped by total strangers).  I wrote about responsibility a while ago.  About taking responsibility for both the good and bad that I’ve created in my own life.  And it feels amazing to be able take responsibility for having such people in my life, but I think I get to share the credit with them for a lot of the magical turns my life has taken, because I couldn’t have made any of them alone.  And the more I think about it, I wouldn’t have wanted to.  It feels better to share the experience with people who care about you.

Gracias, mis seres queridos.

Sorry, I guess I'm feeling quite sentimental today.

Todo está en su cabeza

Sometimes  I get the sneaking suspicion that the things I write about in this blog – especially the ones that seem like great revelations to me – are not remotely new or interesting ideas, but are rather painfully and embarrassingly obvious.  In fact, this suspicion is strong enough and appears frequently enough to make me consider that maybe it’s a waste of time to write it - or at the very least that I should change the name to something more apt, like “A Complete Idiot’s Painfully Clichéd Guide to Life…”  I have, after all, proven myself to be capable of trying to glean wisdom from the most obvious of sources, and from my most moronic decisions.  Some of which, I might add, I seem to make again and again without ever learning any better, as I have ostensibly been endowed with the memory span of a hamster (apparently, fish have much longer memory spans than is commonly believed, by the way.  Thank you, Stephen Fry).  So, why don’t I do it?  First of all, fear of a copyright suit from Penguin Books.   And second, I guess because I’m trying to forgive my foolishness.  Isn’t this what we all do?  Stumble from one thing to the next constantly discovering, forgetting, and re-discovering the essential?  Sometimes we need the obvious to hit us over the head with the force of a heavy wooden baseball bat.  Many times.  So I keep writing, just like I keep learning.

This weekend, through various conversations, encounters, coincidences, and the secret magic of samba drums, the oh-so-obvious lesson seems to be one of attitude and perspective.  When everyone you know is going through similar struggles, and some remain cheerful while others are miserable, you can see how attitude makes a huge difference.  When positivity makes you try something different for a change, and it works to make you feel better - or when it makes you appreciate something nice instead of wondering when it’s going to start to go bad - you see it.  When 3 lines of drummers stand shoulder to shoulder making the same brilliant music, you can see how the lively, laughing, goony-looking man becomes so much more appealing and eye-catching than the beautiful but dour woman next to him.  And how the middle-aged mom who’s dancing and laughing looks funny, but much happier than the cool young couple next to her who are nodding their heads drowsily.  It’s very easy to fall prey to the idea that life is about your circumstances.  And a little bit of it is.  But mostly it’s about the joy, isn’t it?  If there is absolutely none to be found anywhere, then maybe your circumstances are making your life.  But for most of us, we can choose to mine out the enthusiasm and enchantment from what we’re already doing, in the place we already are, and then continue to follow it to wherever else it may lead us. 

I’m going to try harder to remember that this time around.  Like usual. ;-)

Something I've been thinking about for a long time: this city looks much prettier
 if you look up.
These are the same buildings, at street level, and above.

Mother's Day

A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, 

promptly announces she never did care for pie.  ~Tenneva Jordan

The older I get, the more of the world that I see, and the more people I meet, the more I understand that probably the most extraordinary person I have ever known is the first person I ever met: my mom.   I was talking to a friend last night about my mother, and I told him that I have never met a more loving, patient or supportive person in my life.  That if I ever met a person who honestly didn’t like her, I’d probably die from the shock of it.  That my greatest hope is that I have been able to learn enough from watching her to be even a fraction of the mother  she is when my time comes to have children of my own. 

So, on the eve of Mother’s Day in America, here are just a few of the millions of reasons I love mine:

• OK, I’ve got to say the obvious first: she gave me life.  She made me, carried me around in her body for 40 weeks, and then underwent surgery to bring me into the world.  It’s so commonplace, people having children, that I think we sometimes forget how remarkable an act it really is.
• She always encouraged me and my brothers to choose our own paths in life, and always supported whatever we chose without reservation.  I know that most parents try to do that, but so few truly succeed at it.  They’re only human, after all.  It must be maddening to be worried about your children’s’ futures but to bite your tongue when you see them making decisions that you think may be mistakes.  My mother always seemed to understand implicitly that no mind was ever changed by nagging.  She could guide, she could set an example, but she could not choose for us.  She could only offer her support as we went about tying and untying our own knots in life.  One perfect example: despite the fears I’m sure she must have about my summer plans to live in the Guatemalan jungle at an orphanage, the only things she has ever said to me about it are “I am so proud of you,” and “How can we help?” 
• She did, however, impress us with the great importance of really trying.  Quitting was frowned upon in my family.  That’s not to say it never happened, but usually not without a fair amount of discussion and thought given to whether we were quitting because something wasn’t right, or simply because it was challenging.
• She read to me.  All the time.  And when I learned how, she sat patiently and let me read to her.
• She made hard decisions and stuck to them.  Even when we told her we’d hate her for it (oh, adolescence!).  In the time I’ve spent working with kids in my life, I’ve learned only one thing: discipline is the hardest part.  When you see their sad little faces you just want to hug them, tell them it’s ok, and back down.  But if you do that, you hurt them more than you help them.  My mother made the decision to help us be better people, even if it hurt sometimes.  That said, she rarely yelled at us and never made us feel stupid or small.  I’m sure that sometimes we must have annoyed the hell out of her.  But I don’t remember her ever making me feel it.
• She’s smart and funny and, now that I’m old enough to let her be, a great friend.

Having fun in Zakopane

Like I said, that’s only a few reasons.  And of course, I wouldn’t be the person I am now without my Dad either.  His was a different set of skills and sacrifices.  But that’s a whole different holiday.

Responsibility is the watchword.

I know.  Who am I kidding?  I’m aimless and often obnoxiously resistant to the status quo.  Who do I think I am, anyway?  Well, it all started with Easter.  I had five days off work, and the flat to myself.  I like my flatmate, but the alone time was nice, too.  I wandered around in various states of undress, sunbathed on the balcony, and moved all the furniture and cleaned under, around, and above it.  I went for long walks at whatever hour of the day or night I felt like without worrying about disturbing anyone.  And while walking, I did some thinking.  I realized that in the last year, I’ve done everything I said I wanted to.  I am out in the world.  Living in a country where every day is a learning experience and I don’t take any opportunities for granted.  And it’s a pretty great life, most days.  But (there’s always a but) I also felt it, how everyone else was gathering around the table with their loved ones, celebrating the holiday, while I’d moved 5000 miles away from my family and the friends who’d known me my whole life.  And how I do not feel even a single step nearer to building a new family of my own than I was when I left my parents’ home ten years ago.

So I did what anyone would do.  I spent a few hours sitting on my bed with a dozen old issues of National Geographic spread out around me.  I looked at all the photos of far-flung corners of the earth, all the things I still want to see and do.  It usually helps me, to see everything that’s out there in the world for me.  But this time it just made me feel small.  Like one little ant crawling through the vast desert.  A speck.  Yeah, going it alone in the world is exciting.  It affords you the opportunity to feel a part of the whole world, instead of just the corner of it that you happened to be born in.  But it also means that you have more opportunity to see just how small you are.  How fleeting.  And last week, it made me wonder why I wasn’t at home (wherever home might be) building something.  Carving my name in one solid place and leaving behind a procession of people who will look a little bit like me.  Why I haven’t, at the very least, pulled someone into my orbit and together decided to share the open road with them.  I knew that the easy solution would be to say that I simply haven’t met the right person yet, dust myself off, and carry on as I was.  But it’s not true.   I’ve probably met a lot of right people.  But I never chose them.  For a variety of reasons.  Either I was busy choosing the wrong person, or I didn’t feel the need to choose anyone at the time they came around.  The point is, I brought myself here.  And I wanted to know why.  And I wanted to know if it had all been a mistake.

When life isn’t what you thought, or when things fall apart again, or even when you’ve got mixed feelings about where you’ve found yourself, it’s easy  to find something else to point your finger at.  Your job, your partner, God, circumstances, fate, the world.  And, yeah, some things are out of our control.  But it can’t be that many things.  It can’t always be something else.  And furthermore, is that really reassuring?  Does it really feel better to tell yourself that your life hasn’t been up to you at all, but rather a long string of fate, happenstance, and other people’s choices?  To kick and scream like a child and say, “This isn’t what I wanted!”  No, it’s not really fun to think about what you did to contribute to your difficult moments, to your doubts about your life, but if you force yourself to do it anyway, you can do one of two things: appreciate the choices you made because you had good reasons, or recognize your mistakes and do something different next time.  I’m not sure which one I’ve decided on yet.  Maybe a little bit of both.

And here’s the good news:  Taking responsibility has a pretty significant bright side, I’m learning.  I went for a drink with a good friend a few nights ago.  We were having a heart-to-heart about the state of our lives: the beautiful, the ugly, the confounding.  I told him that whatever else happens, I do feel pretty lucky overall, because I’ve recently been on the receiving end of a virtual cascade of love from my friends: invitations, care packages, offers of assistance with my plans for Guatemala and beyond, and unbelievably kind words.   Basically, tangible reminders of how many people I have in my life who care about me and support me.   And then my friend , in his wisdom, said this:  “Yeah, maybe you’re lucky.  But maybe there is something about you that all these people respond to.  Maybe this has something to do with you, too.”  Would you believe I’d never really considered that before?  When everything goes wrong and I feel so impossibly adrift that I just want to lie down and give up, I don’t hesitate to wonder what the hell is wrong with me.  But did you know you can take responsibility for all the good things in your life as well?  That you’ve brought wonderful things upon yourself just as surely as disappointing ones?  That taking responsibility can be more than just an act of accepting blame – it can be an act of validation, too?

Taking responsibility also means telling yourself it’s ok if things are going to be difficult.  That “easy” is not the measuring stick you should use to decide what you should do next.  For example, since I arrived in Szczecin, there have been one or two people in my ear about how difficult it is to make friends here, and how most of the teachers tend to stick with one another’s company because this isn’t the same kind of young, outgoing, friendly city that others may be.  Well, of course I ignored them.  And I got off to a fairly promising start.  But then I ran into a few walls and I, too, gave in and began to accept it as true.  And maybe there is a grain of truth in it.  But there is no such thing as a place where you can’t make friends.  There is no such thing as a place where you have nothing in common with anyone else who lives there.  You just have to find those people. 

And this is where responsibility comes in: it’s not easy.  You have to let people in.  You have to be willing to walk into rooms full of people you don’t know, who speak a language you are struggling to even understand, and let it roll off your back when they find your accent funny.  You have to laugh at yourself and simply accept the fact that you won’t understand every word of what’s going on around you.  It’s intimidating.  Scary, even.  It’s a million miles from a life where you pass comfortable days and nights with people who know you at least as well as you do, if not better.  But one moment you’re having heart palpitations about just how long a barbecue with people you don’t understand could turn out to be, and the next you’re sitting around a table with 8 Polish people and a Mexican man, drinking vodka, laughing and chatting in French, English, Spanish and Polish.  Sometimes all four at once (and yeah, ok...some more than others).  You’re making plans to go kayaking.  Receiving invitations to Barcelona and Berlin.  Happy just to be where you are.  Sure, you could have a nice family and beautiful children at home.  And maybe it’d be wonderful, life-affirming, solid.  But it would also be hard, at times.  And it doesn't even matter what it would be like, because you didn’t choose that.  You chose this.  And this is something special, too.  Something not everyone gets to do. 

And that’s what taking responsibility for your life gets you.  That’s what happens when you start from wherever you happen to be, ignore your fear, and try anyway.  You see that you’re never going to be alone if you don’t let yourself be, that for every awful day, there’s an extraordinary one, and that your life can take an infinite number of shapes, each one beautiful in its own way.  Could anything be more amazing?