Life is Beautiful

 

“Hello friends, this is the first post of the blog I never thought I would write…”

-Me, July 2015

Before composing this, I scrolled back through all 14 of my previous blog posts reading the summaries underneath them and allowing the memories to sift through my mind like the sand that surrounds me on this island. The line of text above was what caught my attention because not only was it the “first post of the blog I never thought I would write”, but it was also the first step into a life I never dreamed I would have. Even now, I sometimes stop to take stock of life and am shocked by where I am and what I have done in the past few years.

I’m currently living on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall islands, and this is the morning of day 5.  The last week has been packed with travel, emotions and general busyness, and I am going to attempt to spread it out and make sense of it all. The first of a sequence of four flights to Kwaj left on Tuesday, July 25th at 9:11 am. It was raining, and I was exhausted from staying up too late packing and getting everything in order. Many hours later, I landed in Honolulu, Hawaii, and after getting settled into my hotel, called my family to check in. I chatted with my Dad for awhile before getting ready to leave the hotel to get some dinner. Before I left, I saw that I had missed a call from my Dad which was odd considering that we had just talked. I called him back, and his first words were, “I’m about to ruin your stay in Hawaii.” Something about police. Something about an accident. Something about a life extinguished far too young. I sat desperately trying to wrap my mind around our conversation for the rest of the night. My mind chased itself in repetitive circles over how much I’m missing at home by being gone–the life events and milestones, the relationships, all of the good times and the hard times as well. I’m missing them all. The deafening question echoing through my hotel room was “Is it worth it?”.

At 4:45 am Hawaiian time, I dragged myself out of bed and to the airport to complete my journey to Kwaj feeling raw and emotional. I was reading the book Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon on the plane which was just released as a movie this year. If you have never read the book, it’s about a girl with a severe immune deficiency disease who has been inside her house for 18 years with insanely detailed measures taken to keep her alive. In the book, she wrestles with how much of life she has missed, and if it has been worth it to have lived to 18 without experiencing anything that the world has to offer. It was resonating with me on such a deep level, and I was highlighting and bookmarking passages all over the place.

The rainbow I saw from the window of the airplane before landing on Kwaj July 26th.

Suddenly, we were landing, and when I looked out the window, I saw Kwaj for the first time after hoping and planning for almost a year, and I felt a thousand emotions in an instant. I couldn’t stop smiling like a fool, and I simultaneously felt like crying and laughing hysterically because as you know, when you’re exhausted and feeling any sort of strong emotion, the line between laughing and crying almost completely disappears.

Three days of signing my name on every piece of paper presented to me, meeting innumerable kind people all friendly and helpful, and trying to process all of the things led me to yesterday. Yesterday, I went to church in the morning and then spent time in my room feeding my soul with silence, “me” time, and missed episodes of The Bachelorette. The same question that was echoing through my hotel room that night has been doggedly pursuing me ever since insisting upon an answer. Last night, I found it.

I was eating dinner and finishing Everything, Everything when it happened.  The quote that reverberates throughout the book is “Love is everything”, but I would like to add my interpretation of the main character’s experience and extend it to say “Living is everything”. Being alive isn’t the same as living. Living is being offered experiences and opportunities and accepting them joyfully instead of backing fearfully into a corner. It’s pushing yourself to discover who you are and all you’re capable of accomplishing. In my life at this moment, living means moving to new places and experiencing life through varied lenses and with different cultural perspectives. It means leaving home. It doesn’t mean that my family and friends aren’t precious to me or that I don’t think of them every day. It certainly means that I’m leaving bits of my heart in all of the places that I have lived, and I have to work hard to stay in touch with the people that I love. So, yes, it is worth it. Life is beautiful and tragic but mostly beautiful, and it is meant to be lived and experienced. 

I think my cousin, Ethan, understood that. He moved away from home and pursued the things that he loved–his girlfriend, his passions, all of the things that he wanted to do and be. I hate that his life was cut short, and I hate that we will never get to see what he could have become. It seems like such a cruel and senseless thing to lose someone when they still have so much life to live, so many things to do, so many opportunities to experience. Do I understand the purpose of him being taken? Not in the slightest. Do I trust that there is one? Absolutely.

As I biked to the beach last night after dinner, I felt overwhelming peace and gratitude for what I’ve been given including all of the people who have worked to include me in this community and make me feel welcome, the beauty of the island where I get to live, and the love and support from my friends and family at home. At the moment, I may be living in a constant state of feeling like I’m forgetting something (my personal brand of jet lag?), and this may be the jumbled rant of someone thrown 17 hours into the future (jet lag again), but in case you were looking for my view on life and meaning, you just received it. Hopefully, you were able to find bits and pieces of coherency in the mix.

I also highly recommend the book Everything, Everything so I attached the link to Amazon for convenience if you’re interested.

New Year. New Adventures

A thousand apologies for the long silence. Master’s work has devoured all of my spare time for both reading and writing. So where before, it was easier to get up on Saturday morning and have a leisurely several hours to sip my coffee and write, I am now forced to hit the books. So this is why instead of sitting cross-legged at my dining room table with my laptop and my coffee in sunny Torreon, I’m sipping tea and eating my mom’s homemade Christmas candy (shhhh don’t tell her) in positively frigid Minnesota. Tea and Christmas candy: Breakfast of Champs, am I right?

This year has been different and busier than last year was even considering that it was my first year teaching. It is easier in a sense because I am teaching content that I have taught before which allows me to anticipate what’s coming next and have my “ducks in a row” so to speak. This year’s class is also a pretty typical first-grade class particularly compared with my class last year which was to quote my favorite master’s professor, a class that was “hand-picked by Satan himself”, but I digress. It is busier with the addition of two master’s classes which keep me on my toes and also teach me more about tiny humans which just happens to be my favorite subject.

I have taken two vacations so far this year. One was in September for Mexican Independence Day weekend where we went camping in Cuatro Cienegas and visited the Dunes.The other was for Thanksgiving where we went to San Miguel de Allendes and Guanajuato City. In San Miguel de Allendes, we stayed in a gorgeous Air B&B and wandered the city. In Guanajuato City, we did what I dubbed the Halloween tour because we visited the mummy museum and the site where people were tortured by monks back in the day.  Both vacations were incredible and allowed me to see even more of an already beloved Mexico.

This year, my contract with CAT is ending–a fact of which I have been all too aware since arriving back home in August. The past few months have been filled with waffling back and forth between staying for another year or leaving and mentally attempting to file every moment and experience under the “pro” or “con” side of the argument. Let me tell you, it has been a mentally and emotionally exhausting process, and I feel like I landed on a different side of the line every day only to be filled with indecision yet again by the day’s end. I am relieved, excited, and more than a little bit sad to say that I finally made a decision and signed saying that I will not be rejoining CAT for another year. Instead, I have signed a contract to teach on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands as a preschool teacher and assistant director of their child development center and school age program. I am thrilled to be going back to the age groups that overflow my heart with joy, and I am soaking in as much information as I possibly can from my master’s classes in order to be as fully prepared as I can be for my new roles. Simultaneously, my heart breaks with the knowledge that I cannot be in three places at once which means that I will not only continue to miss my family and friends from home, but I will add new aches to my heart for the people and places I have grown to love so much in my new home.

New adventures and a new year! I’m sure it will be nothing less than eventful, and I plan to keep you up-to-date on all of the new developments. Enjoy your new year everyone!