The Next Step Begins

(written 17 August 2013)

Just under four months since I finished my service in the Peace Corps, and I find myself again sleeping under a mosquito net, waking up with a keen awareness of the temperature outside, blowing out a candle in my electricity-free, simple cabin, using an outhouse, and marveling at the beauty all around me.

I'm keeping house at a lodge on the shores of Skilak Lake, on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska.  I've been here in the Northern USA for about four days--enough to remind me both how uncomfortable transitions can be and how quickly we settle in to new environments.

What brought me here?  Ten letters, more or less, written over five and a half years...one question that cried out louder than any others.  The urging of my heart to be where it felt it needed to be.  As I journeyed from Boston to Minneapolis, and Minneapolis to Anchorage, I realized, my soft landing is over.

Harvard--my Cambridge home--felt like a moment, begun and finished in one seductive bat of an eye.  It was all I hoped and anticipated it would be: students, staff, colleagues old and new.  Street musicians' melodies wafting in my dorm room window, more pizza and ice cream than one could ever need, endless amounts of food savored under the magnificent chandeliers of Annenberg dining hall.  It was new relationships and old ones taken to new depths.  It was sculling on the Charles, talking into wee hours, alternately being silly with and scolding high school students.

Come early August, the fairy tale ended, as it always must.  The students moved out, the glass slipper lay idle on the stairwell as I fought another round of the recurring battle with my suitcases.  The trip included, as a bonus, a night in Minneapolis with my high school classmate Angie, who had switched apartments since I last saw her (two weeks prior to my Peace Corps departure).  An icy plane ride provided glimpses of breathtaking Alaskan scenery below.

My arrival in Alaska was simultaneously warm (the people) and chilly (the weather).

Imagine your first embrace with a friend you've not seen in so long you've forgotten his face.  Imagine surroundings that are new but remind you of places you've loved.  Imagine becoming roommates--even temporarily--with the stranger who picked you up at the airport.  Imagine knowing that right at this moment is where your plan ends.

And the real transition--from the Peace Corps to the unknown, the next step--begins.

Back at camp in North Carolina, we used to sing karaoke to The Fray's How to Save a Life.  I hear a particular line in my head all the time, with one word change: "Had I known how to make a life."  I once rejected the notion that I am an academic, and was gently corrected by a professor that I can call myself one or not, but it doesn't make me any less a scholar.  I haven't figured out what I'd like to pursue as advanced training; it's fluctuated among ideas including filmmaking, fine arts, disaster relief, crisis intervention, Master's and PhD's degrees and biscuits for all.  But if nothing else, I think I'm currently and unavoidably a scholar of the shapes and rhythms of human life.  I'm fascinated by what fills our days in various roles and locales.  I'm intrigued by how much my rhythm can change...by what stays the same...by what that means about me.  Is who I am determined by what I do?  If so, when what I do changes, what of me stays the same?

For now...the air is crisp, the mosquitos hungry, the lodge cozy, the kitchen always filled with myriad delights for both nose and tongue.  My hands feel the soreness and fatigue of dishes and cleaning.  My body slips into deep sleep at night, and in quiet moments throughout the day, I pause, rocking back and forth in a rocking chair, keeping time to the lapping of the water on the shores of Skilak Lake.