This post was started two weeks ago. I opened up a new page to write...and left it blank for fourteen days. This morning, I realized that I was leaving again. So, it's now or never to talk about coming home, right?
It is, of course, strange to get home. After a year of being
away, enough things have change here and enough about me has changed to make it
strange to be back in a place so similar and so different.
Sitting in the Chicago O’Hare airport, counting down the
minutes until my flight took off, I couldn’t help but stare around me. America
jumped out at me from every angle. It’s true, Americans can be picked out in a
crowd. We talk a certain way, move a certain way, interact with our
surroundings a certain way, we even sit and stand in ways unique to our
culture.
And so I came home, home to a place filled with sights and
sounds I new so very well. But after many months of being so very far away,
they seemed so odd upon my returning to them.
I look around the neighborhood I grew up in and see the big houses and
spacious lawns and know without a doubt that I am a part of the haves in the
world. And my heart aches because I know the have nots and have seen the small
thread that separates one way of life from another. While away, I wanted to
change the way I live, to live more lightly upon the earth, but coming home it’s
harder amongst the haves to live with less.
Even though its still hard to answer questions about college—no
one asks about gap years, and I never know how much to say. But these days when
people ask, I have a ready answer when I’m asked what I want to study or what I
might want to do. That’s thanks to my time in New Zealand.
And from spending a little time glimpsing into the windows
of the world’s cultures, I’ve found that I know a little more about the world.
My knowledge of geography has increased exponentially. I can say thank you in five more languages. But
then again, all these gains in worldliness are accompanied by a similar
increase in the belief that I am much more worldly than I really am. Cue the
place dropping (“This one time in Thailand…)
Here at home, I’ve found myself gravitating toward the
important people in my life, eager to spend time with them. And at night, I
thinking about those I met all along the way, during a late night game of cards
or while volunteering in a garden or while struggling to speak their language.
If there is one thing I have learned all this year, it is that the people in
this world are amazing. We are so similar and so different all over the world. So
many times, I have walked away from an encounter, exclaiming to myself how much
I love people. We humans never cease to amaze me.
