It feels like the beginning again. The house is covered with a thin layer of sand from daily trips to the beach. When I make my coffee or tea before work, I no longer have to stumble around in the dark. My toenails are painted, my face freckled and tanned. Even the smells are the same: my skin like sunscreen and salt, the terrace like detergent from clothes drying in the sun. My mind is tricked by my senses, and I wake up to the alarm clock easily and go to school with energy—I feel like I did when I first got here, when everything was new. And yet, when I think about this year, I can't believe how much has happened, how much I've learned, how different my life is. The Sufi poet Rumi wrote, "Flow down and down in always/widening rings of being" and that's what this year reminds me of. The end feels like the beginning, except now I have a slew of new knowledge and experiences.
More than anything, I've learned about who I am, which has been a difficult thing to do. For me, it's always hard to find the balance between learning from the people around me and remaining myself. This year has been no different, since I so admire my friends here.
My friend Cory is candid and bold and seems to fear nothing; from her I've learned to let go, to speak my opinions and not be so afraid of offending. Almost paradoxically, I've learned from Maddie, my friend and roommate, the virtue of being quiet. When we have conversations, sometimes she nods and says nothing, and I can tell she's taking it in rather than feeling the need to fill the space with more words. And in the mornings, while I ramble on, she's content to drink her tea and look out the window; maybe she's just sleepy, but she seems, for those few minutes, at peace (and I've found that sometimes the two are really quite similar). Marie, more than anyone I know at our age, knows who she is. She is self-conscious of nothing, laughs at herself, and is unwilling to change her character for anyone. From her, I've learned the most important lesson: that who I am is valuable intrinsically—that even when I make the most horrendous mistakes in Spanish after studying it for half my life, or say really dumb things in my native language, or accidentally offend people, I am a good person, someone who is loved by lots of people.
I keep thinking back to Rumi's poem, of how perfect that image is. To me, it captures what seems like an oxymoron, the idea that we should know who we are while also improving things about ourselves. But Rumi's line explains it to me: grow, but keep your shape. So here I am, coming close to the end of an incredibly challenging year, and I'm content to say that my ring of being has widened a lot, but retained its form. I'm learning from the people around me, but I'm also realizing that there are things about me that will never change—and I don't want them to. I'm me. And lately, that feels pretty good.
(Cory, Marie, Maddie, me... we still can't figure out who took this picture)
(Cory, Marie, Maddie, me... we still can't figure out who took this picture)
