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?