Time to Go, Time to Be Still

All right…one day until this journey begins.  Here’s what will be happening for me and the other incoming Peace Corps volunteers serving in Uganda (I think there are about 50 of us): on Tuesday, we’ll all meet up in Philadelphia, and we’ll spend the day in a hotel, going through some basic orientation-type meetings and information sessions.  After spending the night in the hotel, we take a bus up to New York on Wednesday, where we’ll fly out of JFK Airport.  The flight leaves around 5:30 in the afternoon and will take us across the Atlantic (which will be my first time away from the Americas).  There’s a stop in Brussels, and then we head on to Uganda from there, landing at the Entebbe Airport in the southern part of the country, near Lake Victoria.  It’s a total flying time of about 17 hours or so, I think, and, with plane changes and time changes, we’ll get into Uganda relatively late on Thursday, if I remember correctly.  After that, the group starts a ten-week training period.  About half of this time will be spent on technical training, where I’ll learn about the work I’ll be doing (something health-related), and the other half will focus on language and cultural training.  During those ten weeks, I will be staying with a host family, and I am definitely looking forward to that!  I think that experience could definitely be a huge help as I try to get some kind of a handle on Luganda, which is the language that most volunteers need to learn.  Then, once we get past the halfway point of training, I think we might start hearing some details about our specific assignments…

This morning, as I slowly woke up and realized that I now only had one more night in this bed, I had what I am going to call a “What in the world am I doing?” moment.  I think I finally started to understand just how big of a change this is all going to be, how much of a leap of faith it is.  Admittedly, at that point, I felt pretty helpless.  As much as I think the next two years are going to be full of great and important experiences, I just don’t know what is going to happen.  There are so many unknowns, but one thing I do know is I’m going to be missing friends and family so much.  This past week has been full of time being or talking with a bunch of people who I really care about, from great high school and college friends, to the swimmers I’ve coached for the past five summers, to loving relatives, and they will all be on my mind during my time overseas.  Maybe I’m finally actually coming to terms with the fact that, yeah, this is going to be hard…

Well, I didn’t have too much time to dwell on these feelings, since I had procrastinated and still had quite a few things to take care of before tomorrow.  And yet, I’ve had another realization since this morning.  As I rushed to fill out paperwork, run errands, and say some last-minute goodbyes to a couple friends, I also was fortunate enough to spend a little time with both of my grandparents.  My grandma came over after lunch, and I’m so glad that I was able to hear her words of encouragement.  She had undoubtedly realized a long time ago that this experience was going to be hugely challenging for me, but her confidence that I would be able to handle it (with support, of course, from those in Uganda and from those an ocean away) was definitely reassuring.  Later in the afternoon, I stopped by my grandpa’s farm.  He was inside the house, probably taking a rest after a long day of work, and we talked for a few minutes.  Sometime during that conversation, a very slow and deliberate conversation between two people who are often content to keep speech to a minimum, a conversation that ranged from the time I was leaving tomorrow to a comparison of the behavior of cows and pigs, I looked around the farmhouse and suddenly realized that time had seemed to slow down in this place, that it was okay to simply sit and “be.”  Instead of worrying about what might happen tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year, we took the time to enjoy the flowers along the path outside as we walked back out to my car.  We examined the tomato vines growing next to the porch, we watched the butterflies hovering over the plants to the left of the path, and Grandpa mentioned that it might be time to trim the hedge on the right side of the path.  After giving him a hug, getting in the car, and waving to Grandpa one last time as I turned out of the driveway, time seemed to slowly return to normal, but the feeling that had developed in my heart, a feeling born from the unspoken wisdom of a much more experienced man, remained.

Stillness

It seems to me that so many of us are looking for some measure of inner peace…and I am included in this group.  I often like to think that I am an active participant in this life, always trying to answer the question, “What can I do?”  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I think that doing is incredibly important, but I’m not sure if inner peace is something we can achieve by doing more and more.  Perhaps more importantly, I don’t think that I should see my own inner peace as the end goal here.  Rather, I’d like to think that it is more of a starting point, and then, with a personal sense of peace in place, our actions can flow from there.

Let me stop for a second as I recognize that this is a difficult balancing act.  I do not think that we should first focus completely on cultivating inner peace, waiting to act until that goal is totally achieved.  At least for me, I would probably be waiting a long, long time to do anything!  Rather, I think a combination of doing and being is needed from the start.  The issue is that I might go overboard on the doing part, possibly losing the all-important sense of why I do what I do.  Sometimes, I just need to take a step back, be still and present in the moment, and listen to the beautiful world that is all around me.  I realize that the world is bigger than what I make it out to be, and I realize that, although I may feel like a small speck on the surface of this huge planet, I am not alone.  I am never alone.  At this point, I think my vision becomes a bit clearer, and my mind and heart become a bit more open to what this world needs and to how I can best show love to this world.  And so, my being becomes my doing.  My actions can flow out of this inner peace that I have been so graciously given.

So then, for now, I can stop worrying about what I will do during the next two years.  It will be challenging, it might be frustrating, and many things will almost certainly be out of my control.  But this is not a reason to despair or to become incredibly nervous.  I just need to remember to step back, to be silent, to fully experience the moment, and to trust.  In the quiet, beautiful stillness of my grandfather’s farm, I hear a still, small voice:

“Everything will be all right, my son.  Go, experience each day with an open heart. All is well.”

(Some of the ideas about “being” and “doing” are based on an excerpt from No Man is an Island, by Thomas Merton.)