It is almost overwhelming returning home to a room and space and a whole household of things I lived without for a year. And I mean a full household of my own personal belongings that turned my apartment into a home for two years at University. There are things I forgot about (My Lego collection and several sets of odd sized bedding), and a few I missed terribly (playing Nintendo 64 Tetris). Much of my year living in Manchester was done with the consideration of 'living simply', and some of the clutter seems unnecessary in my room now. The place where I felt this change most was when I turned and looked into my closet with a bit of a sense of angst.
Let me assure you here that there are not any skeletons or bodies hiding in there. There are no strange relics of past lives or echoes of a self that I'd rather keep hidden.
All there is in there are some old clothes and university t-shirts that might have once been more important than they are today. Some people might think of them as second skins that create an identity of a formative part of life and should be held onto as memory from that time. Once upon a time they probably did for me too. The simple story was that a lot of it didn't fit post-Manchester-me anymore.
They are no longer my identity. Just memories that were good mostly, have come to pass, and now I have grown into the current best version of me that lived out of two suitcases of clothes for a year. This current and best version of me also lost several clothes sizes worth of weight after cycling or walking everywhere around Manchester, and the things I left behind last August quite literally no longer fit my body.
Change is easily seen from the physical outside, it was harder for me to see the change a year of accompanying St Chrysostoms Church had inflicted on me until I stood there staring at a closet of transformed 'me's and said out loud to myself:
"It's okay to have grown and not wanting to be who I had been when I was last in this room packing a year ago."
Suddenly that little knot of angst loosened in my chest and I felt like I could let it all go, and give myself the permission to be me as I was in Manchester in Virginia.
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Thursday, August 4, 2016
Reflection from 17 June 2016
Packing
The date suddenly hits you
One month until you finish work, another few weeks before you leave - naturally you start winding projects to a close and packing your things. There is so much to do, where do you begin?
You start with the immediate, making sure to take in every new moment and experience, tallying up all you've yet to do and all you've already done. Then these lists take you back in your memory to the beginning of this journey.
Lets start over
Packing started the day you arrived, in a reverse way: everything was new and you had to take it all in somehow. Sights, tastes, smells, new people, new work, new everything. All of it at once and you were pushing all this excitement into every day, packing in as much as you could into a day.
It very soon stopped being new, and even though you're miles from where you began it all started to feel familiar, but you were given the chance to be unfamiliar. Not unfamiliar with others, but with yourself. Given the chance, you now have the opportunity to grow in a new environment foreign yet familiar to the one you came from.
But now you are at the end and you've still got to pack
How do you fit all of this garden of change into one suitcase, one backpack, one sentence when people ask you how your year was? You want to ask them, 'Do you have a year for me to adequately explain?'
All you can do is smile when you answer, 'It was good, and I am still trying to unpack all of my experience that has changed me through the past year, though I did not bring nearly as much physically back as I left with!' But the memories you packed into your heart along the way
They take up no room and weigh the heaviest of all.
The date suddenly hits you
One month until you finish work, another few weeks before you leave - naturally you start winding projects to a close and packing your things. There is so much to do, where do you begin?
You start with the immediate, making sure to take in every new moment and experience, tallying up all you've yet to do and all you've already done. Then these lists take you back in your memory to the beginning of this journey.
Lets start over
Packing started the day you arrived, in a reverse way: everything was new and you had to take it all in somehow. Sights, tastes, smells, new people, new work, new everything. All of it at once and you were pushing all this excitement into every day, packing in as much as you could into a day.
It very soon stopped being new, and even though you're miles from where you began it all started to feel familiar, but you were given the chance to be unfamiliar. Not unfamiliar with others, but with yourself. Given the chance, you now have the opportunity to grow in a new environment foreign yet familiar to the one you came from.
But now you are at the end and you've still got to pack
How do you fit all of this garden of change into one suitcase, one backpack, one sentence when people ask you how your year was? You want to ask them, 'Do you have a year for me to adequately explain?'
All you can do is smile when you answer, 'It was good, and I am still trying to unpack all of my experience that has changed me through the past year, though I did not bring nearly as much physically back as I left with!' But the memories you packed into your heart along the way
They take up no room and weigh the heaviest of all.
 |
| Garden from Rocamadour, France |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)