One short and obvious, one sort of odd and maybe a little amusing, and one more serious and reflective...and longer...
1.) I stink
at writing blogs…or at least at writing blogs regularly. But, you already know that, so I
won’t dwell on it…
2.)
Sometimes I sleep on the floor…don’t worry, not directly on the cold, hard
concrete. I don’t know if my bony frame
could make it through a night like that.
There’s a woven mat on the floor that’s about as long as I am, and I take
a fairly thick blanket and do a sort of tri-fold thing with it (basically making
a flattened Z). The folded blanket goes
on top of the mat, a camping pillow goes at one end, and I go inside the
blanket, so that two layers are beneath me and I can use the third as a
cover. Why do I do this? Because I also stink at waking up early,
especially when I sleep in my bed. After
two years of use, I fit into the mattress like a baseball fits into a catcher’s
mitt. It’s a bit too cozy when I need to
get out of bed early. Sleeping on the
floor is a bit less comfortable, but I can still go to sleep fairly easily,
and, in the morning, I still don’t want to get up. But, at least I wake up when my alarm goes
off. When I’m sleeping in bed and I need
to get up for something, I set at least four alarms on my phone the night
before, spaced out so that they get gradually closer together the longer I
sleep in. Even with those fail-safes in
place, sometimes my barely-awake brain is able to silence all of the alarms so
that it can go back to bed. It’s a
pretty impressive feat, considering I can’t even remember doing that when I
wake up again hours later… So, because I
still have the sleep schedule of a lazy guy in college, sometimes I sleep on
the floor. (And I secretly hope that it
helps my posture a bit, too…)
3.) Moving
to something a bit more serious, I’ve recently come to a greater appreciation
of how eye-opening this whole experience has been for me. In this case, I mean “eye-opening” in terms
of learning about myself. Obviously, the
past two years have given me a wealth of interesting outward experiences, but I’m
looking inward right now. Over the past
week or so, I’ve been reading journal entries that I wrote during
training. Believe it or not, when we
first arrived in Uganda, I was amazingly good about writing in that journal,
just about every night. This lasted
almost the whole way through our 10 week training period. Then I got to site, and I started to write in
the journal only slightly more frequently than I wrote blogs. In other words, there have been stretches
where I didn’t write in it for months.
Anyway, the point is that I’ve been looking back at some of the first
thoughts I had after coming to Uganda, and I’m realizing that I have changed a
little bit. Admittedly, I was kind of naïve,
I was incredibly idealistic (sometimes to the point of writing stuff that seems
excessively sappy and sentimental), and, although it was not explicitly said, it
was implied that I thought I was a pretty good and special person for doing what
I’m doing. I also thought that I was
this calm, cool, and collected Zen master who could handle anything with grace
and ease. (I may be exaggerating the
truth slightly with my word choice, but you get the idea.)
I’m
certainly not saying that I’ve made a 180 degree turn, here, but I definitely
see differences between who I was and who I am.
I certainly don’t know everything I should know for the work that I’m
doing, but I’ve learned quite a bit over the past couple of years. I haven’t turned to ultra-realism, but my
idealism is tempered now by the raw experience of things sometimes not living
up to my hopes. I may still get
sentimental on occasion (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but that has
become counterbalanced by what I think is a healthy skepticism. In other words, I question things even more
than I used to, which sometimes helps to find deeper truths that can emerge
from previous ideas.
Perhaps
most importantly, I know now that I am not, as I might have thought, a person
with an extraordinary, Zen-like amount of patience and collectedness. Indeed, I have found that there is a pretty
intense temper that finds its way to the surface once in a while. A few months ago, I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and a passage near the end really
nailed it for me:
“Everyone
says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this
niceness is your own doing, and you may easily not feel the need for any better
kind of goodness. Often people who have
all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize their need
for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their
self-satisfaction is shattered. In other
words, it is hard for those who are ‘rich’ in this sense to enter the Kingdom.”
In the next
paragraph, Lewis goes on to discuss “nasty people” who try to be better and
find out right away that they need lots of help. As usual, I see some parts of myself fitting
into the (apparently) “nice chap” model and some parts fitting into the “nasty
person” model. (I also think that other
parts of myself are not encompassed by these two possibilities, but that’s not
really relevant to my point right now.) The
past two years have, in some ways, helped me to bring my personality and my
soul out into the sunlight, so that I could see some of the scratches and bruises
and dents. It’s hard, when you’re in the
moment, or when you look back on a moment, and you realize that it’s not one of
your best moments. It’s hard to discover
that the frustrations and realities of the world are threatening to make you jaded
or pessimistic or devoid of compassion, that they are tearing down your
abstractions and ideals about how things should work and how things should
be. It’s hard to find yourself, and to be
not quite satisfied with what you have found.
In the end,
though, I’m glad. It’s important to
realize these things. I think it’s important
to be “not quite satisfied” with what I have found in myself, because it pushes
me toward a path of growth. I think it’s
important to understand that I could be nudged down a path that leads to
pessimism, jadedness, or despair. I
occasionally see myself turning in that direction. On the whole, I love what I’m doing, but it
can be really easy to forget that when the frustrations and annoyances build
up. It can be really easy to become hard
and closed, and maybe even a little unfriendly at times. But, witnessing those parts of myself is a
step toward overcoming those parts of myself, with help. By closing myself off in an (often failed)
attempt to shut out frustrations, I am also shutting out the positive influence
of those around me. I am now trying to make
a conscious effort to remain open, even when things start to tick me off, and I
have witnessed a positive impact, both on my thoughts and on my work (while
still seeing much room for improvement, of course).
Some years
ago, during a trip to Nicaragua, I wrote that I have no right to despair. I would go beyond that now. I would say that, for me, despair is not even
a reasonable option. I’m going to
support this with passages taken from another British author, J.R.R. Tolkien
(yep, I’m re-reading the Lord of the Rings right now): First, “Despair is only
for those who see the end beyond all doubt.
We do not.” Second, “The world is
indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is
much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it
grows perhaps the greater.”
I am so
fortunate to have this opportunity, and to continue the experience into another
year. I have the opportunity to do
something that I want to do, something that I love. Doing it means that I also miss some things
that I love, but they will be brought back again soon enough. Though the joy and love does often mingle with
disappointment and difficulty, perhaps this process makes the positive that
much stronger. Though I have come to see
many of my faults and blemishes more clearly, perhaps, in the end, that
knowledge is making me a better, and happier, person.
