lists

It’s been one month and twenty-five days since I left Senegal. It’s been one month and eleven days since I returned to the United States. It’s been two weeks and two days since I’ve been back at Kalamazoo.

I have felt amid a whirlwind of transitions. Sometimes scary, sometimes sad, mostly exciting, all challenging in their own way. All full of their lessons and opportunities for thought and reflection.

Thoughts I’ve had in transition’s midst:

–       I’ve missed Grandpa more in the last six weeks than anything I’ve previously experienced, and not being able to share my tales and adventures, photos and stories with him has been the hardest part of coming home.

–       Senegal was a profoundly religious and spiritual experience for me. And I still don’t quite know what that means, except I know that it was.

–       Senegal wasn’t always great. But I’m continually more and more grateful for it all – for making me stronger and for creating in my life a family of people who provide the greatest warmth and comfort from having walked through it together.

–       I can’t let go of my morning coffee time. This space, this most favorite time of day, is so quiet, so slow, so warm, so safe, so thoughtful. It’s so calming, centering, full of breath that I can’t imagine how it ever wouldn’t be worth losing those extra minutes of sleep. Taking these long, deep sips is essential to keeping my feet on the ground.

–       I just keep thinking of the baobabs, of their strength and resilience. Thinking of the way they traveled so far, endured so much, and given a stable and warm resting place with attentive hands to care for them, have come back to life. Thinking of what these trees have to teach about perseverance, about commitment, about connection, about staying.

–       My siblings, in all of their forms and spread across all of their distances, are such a treasured, important, and wonderfully human part of my life, by which I continue to feel more and more blessed. My gratefulness for their presence, for their wit and wisdom, for their constant teasing and adventure, spans oceans.

–       Learning how to breathe was one of the great challenges and great victories of my time in Senegal.

–       To sit down at this shared table to a meal prepared in togetherness, in care, in laughter and deep friendship with wonderful, comfortable, fascinating conversation flitting between forks and spices, glasses of wine and folk music is one of the greatest joys of my life.

–       At this moment on my path, to care for and hold children experiencing suffering, as I hope to do in Kenya this summer, feels like what I am meant to be doing. Not ‘meant to be’ in a divine intervention/fate/prophecy sort of way, but in a way in which my best self is bound up in showing this love and compassion, so this is how I’m meant to contribute good to this world.

My life is full of to-do lists. I am in a constant process of checking off, just in time to add another empty box, waiting to be completed. My life is in a planner, with hours and locations labeled, color-coded, organized to the minute. My life is a whirlwind of stress and hard work, of pushing past exhaustion to just keep doing.

So there is such a fresh air, peaceful and stunning rejuvenation when I sit down, still and silently, to write this other kind of list, this list that doesn’t have deadlines, check marks, and anxiety. This list that just is, is here as a record of thought, feeling, being.

And so it’s my goal every week to write this kind of list alongside all those others as an opportunity not just to synthesize, to connect, and to center, but to remind myself that regardless of how many books I’ve yet to read, papers I’ve yet to write, due dates I’ve yet to see come and go, transitions I’ve yet to wade through, to live in this life is such a wondrous and dazzling thing.