The Transition Artist

What is one do when offered the world? Should they laugh? Cry? Weep, even? Or just sit, content and pleased, feeling only how rich it is to be so fortunate?

This past weekend I felt like doing all of the above. I visited Strasbourg and a small town in Alsace in France, and Freiburg and the Black Forest in Germany on a trip through my program. It was a weekend full of adventure, feeling, and fullness. I lit a candle in a beautiful gothic church in Strasbourg in honor of my family and felt like crying. I got so tired I was absolutely delirious, running only on caffeine, and somehow managed to walk around all weekend long and continue exploring into the night. I laughed so hard I cried with friends I’ve only known for a little over a month, met even more new people, and felt as happy and full as humanly possible. To top off all of these wonderful experiences, as we traveled from place to place, I had the opportunity to sit and think about how grateful I am to be living in a such constant state of wonder and adventure, and realized that not a single bit of it would be possible without my parents.

The past two months have been a whirlwind. I’ve hardly had time to even write the past two weeks because I’ve gotten so caught up in living in each exciting moment that I haven’t set any time aside to reflect on any of it. This is both a blessing and a curse.

I’ve half-written about four blog posts in the past week, trying to scrape something together during my free time, but remembered that, due to the fact that this blog isn’t something that I need to force, nor am required to write, that it was probably more important for me to just live in the moment as it was happening and worry about writing later. So here I am now, with the first spot of free time I’ve had in two weeks, to talk about (in much fewer words than it would actually take me to describe) the millions of things that have occurred to me. The first of those being that I don’t even know how to begin to describe how grateful I am to be here.

My parents have done a lot for me since the day I came into the world, and I don’t think anyone ever takes the time to adequately thank their parents for all the things they do for us as we grow up. But how could we? I’ve now visited 13 different countries, been to France 11 times, and seen more in my short life than I could ever have hoped for, and I wouldn’t have done a single bit of it without my parents’ help. They’ve literally given me the world, and I’m more grateful than words can express. That being said, I’m even more grateful that they still tolerate my hunger for experience and unquenchable thirst for travel.

Experience is quite literally what shapes everything that we do. It determines how well we know ourselves, how well we understand our surroundings, and how we contextualize the actions of other people. Meeting people who didn’t grow up the same way I did, trying something that scares me, or launching myself headfirst into the deep end of a new experience are my favorite things in the entire world. There are a lot of positive and negative things that end up resulting from all of them, but there is also a lot of growth that happens in the midst of all of it.

I could sit here and recount to you how incredible the Black Forest was (when really all you need to picture is this: the tallest, most lovely pine trees in the world + so much moss), how beautiful the architecture is in Europe, how much I enjoyed trying German and Alsatian beer and wine, or how passionate I decided I am about a really good bratwurst, but what I really want to share is perspective. I could travel to all the ends of the earth and in finite detail describe every single inch of territory, and every thought I had along the way (and if I get that opportunity I probably will), but the experience is nothing if not accompanied by reflection. 

I’m currently taking a class on global competence and communication, and we’ve talked about many different ways of identifying self and being sensitive to other cultures within the frameworks of those cultures. One of the most interesting topics we covered was a scale of intercultural sensitivity that goes through six different stages: denial, defense, minimization, acceptance, adaptation, and integration. Each step requires a different level of cultural sensitivity,  the first three being largely ethnocentric (placing one’s own culture at the center of their rationale and means of understanding others) and the second three being ethnorelative (putting one’s own culture aside and seeing things in the context of other cultures), and I’ve become hyper-aware of where I am on that scale and started trying to imagine where other people might be.

Although I hate to admit it, I know I’m still very ethnocentric. I relate things to American culture half the time, if not only for the sake of learning about differences, but then try to pretend I’m not an American tourist and want to blend in the other half of the time. On the intercultural sensitivity scale this puts me right around defense (which means that you often reject your own culture or another in order to feel more at ease with the sense of self you’ve maintained). Now this isn’t necessarily something I’m proud of, but I think it’s important that I recognize it so that I can seek growth.

There is no such thing as the perfect person or the right way to do life, but I think the people who get the closest are the ones who are curious. Being curious enough to explore differences, to recognize that you might be wrong, or even simply to feel challenged in your thinking; this is the stuff good humans are made out of. So now, instead of sharing directly all the experiences I’ve neglected to write about, I want to just challenge you to seek your own. And overthink them. And analyze them. And aspire to be one of those people just curious enough to grow.

When someone hands you the world, you can’t just sit and process. You just go and do.

xx

i