Observations From Home

I find it interesting that we do not usually notice changes right away, especially when they are in ourselves. It seems that when you are around the thing being changed during the changing process, it imperceptible until contrasted with what it was before. I have had a lot of this contrast since I arrived home almost two weeks ago. Some of the changes are kind of bizarre things, some are very logical things, some are little, and some seem huge. All are examples of how the tour this summer changed me and how different I am from the person who left home at the end of May.

I have noticed that I have been keeping all of my things very condensed and contained since arriving home. I have never really been one to spread out in an area and have always liked things put away and organized. But since getting home it seems a subconscious drive to keep all of my stuff in a single room of the house, easily contained, simple to find, quick to gather up. I am sure this comes from two months of living out of an 8-gallon bin and moving locations each night. There was not much to keep track of and what there was had to be kept together to ensure that nothing was forgotten the next morning.

I have seen a change in my attitude towards doing. I tend to be an obsessive-compulsive doer. I have great difficulty leaving any task, even one with no time-table or deadline attached, undone when I know that I could be working on it. Any time not accomplishing something (usually defined as doing something that can be crossed off of a list) feels like a waste of time. I continually do things so that I can relax later. Ironically later never comes, go figure. But since returning from the trip I have noticed that, while I still have an accomplisher’s mentality of doing things, I don’t feel a continual pull to do things and get things done. I have things that I need to accomplish before I return to school next week and I have some things that I would like to accomplish prior to my return. But I find it easier to do them as I am able, as I find time, as I have a desire to work on them.

I also see in myself a better ability to accept ambiguity and the unknown. I still like to know what to expect in any given situation and to have the next eight steps laid out ahead of time. But I learned this summer how to continue forward in spite of being able to see only the next step in front of me, and sometimes barely even that. In some situations I still require definition, but I think that this summer I began to learn how to identify the difference between situations that I legitimately needed information about in order to prepare for and situations that I simply wanted information about but could walk through with no pre-knowledge of any kind.

I also noticed changes in myself physically. My body has not slept past 7:30am since I returned home. I certainly do not object to this, but still find it fascinating. I have also noticed that there are quite a few articles of clothing that no longer fit the way they used to. I did not actually lose weight on the trip. I remained about the same on the scale but am, as my sister put it, now undeniably more svelte (slender, lithe, slim) than when I left home. I have no objection to this except that I now find much of my clothes no longer fits as well as it used to. This is on of the changes that had no occurred to me. I knew that I would certainly be in better shape when I got home, that I would probably lose weight, and would slim down. I did not think of the impact it would have upon my wardrobe.

Before the trip I would almost always be playing music of some kind while doing anything: working out, sewing, crafting, cleaning, working on the computer…Since the trip, however, I have had little or no desire to listen to music. I greatly enjoy having a piano constantly available for playing, but have rarely opened my iTunes or Pandora since my return. I grew accustomed to hours a day being spent in relative silence on my bike, the only soundtrack being the wind in my ears, the pavement under my tires, and the occasional passing car. I think I also grew accustomed to being able to listen more without having so much noise to sift through.

I find myself much more open to new things. A phrase that has entered my vocabulary and will probably continue there for the rest of my life is “I don’t know how to _____. But that’s OK. I don’t know how to bike across the country either and I already did that. So let’s go.” The world no longer looks like an impossible thing. It looks like an endless array of possibilities and opportunities waiting to be discovered, grasped, and run with. I was pulled up from sitting on my hands this summer and now I am excited to reach out and touch the world. The next big adventure before me: running  Cross Country.