Pivot
As I grow into adulthood, more of my winters are spent thinking about the coming year. It is in the nature of the season, I suppose. The world is covered in muted clouds and muffling snow, and so time is spent between four stone walls, thoughts expanding to fill the cold air.
There is as much to think about as there is little to do. I have made numerous attempts to create new work here, all of which seem to have frozen in place. I feel like a spruce tree that has been transplanted in a desert, where each attempt I make to lay down roots is met with harsh sand which gives no nourishment. In fact, it often drains me far more than I care to admit. I am starting a new endeavor this coming Tuesday, God willing.
Even with this hope, the nature of work here leaves much to be desired. A mission of cultural exchange seems to be a dying art in a modern world torn apart by relative truths and realpolitik. There is little room for the kind of idealism that the Peace Corps has spent sixty years sustaining. I frequently feel that instead of leading the youth towards a more hopeful truth, I serve as little more than a passing image – a white, foreign, outsider – representing both old prejudices and modern propagandists.
As John 8:32 says: “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”. The truth here is that we are in a transition called the present, which moves us between the past and the future. We are only ever in the present, the future becomes the past as it passes through us, but we never leave. As the world changes around us so blindingly fast, it is easy to get caught in the current, or in trying to predict it. We start to imagine futures or yearn for the past, yet neither change for us.
I frequently fall victim to this foolishness. I have yearned for a first year of service that brought me good friends in my host town of Chichaoua. I imagined a future where my workplace reopened in September, then October, then January. We live in the present, the only place one ever lives, and as I was dreaming of other times, the present kept changing the future to the past.
The difficulty now is looking forward without the fog of imagination, and reflecting without the nostalgia of yearning, and the truth is, it is time to change course. In this present moment, having spent far too much time imagining (and perhaps not enough time yearning), I have ignored the honest conditions of the present – which truthfully are just as good and just as bad as they appear to be.
I have found a new workplace that I am excited to begin work at, a center for women in difficult situations that has generously offered me class space throughout the week. I hope that there will be room for me to build understanding with my students, a passion for learning, and enthusiasm for the future.
Recently, I spent a month this December in Europe. There is too much there to write about, but I hope that the beauty and grace that were reflected in me there become manifest in my future writings. All I have to say now is to keep faith and strive boldly.
And as my lovely grandmother says, “Onwards!”
