Nothing Stands Still

One of the hardest concepts to wrap my head around during my service is the passage of time. The general consensus is that days are long and weeks are fast, but time has never felt so slow yet so fast all at once. It's also difficult to fully understand the ways in which time keeps moving back home, even though it feels like life as I know it is simply in suspended animation. But time continues, and life moves on. Friends are falling in love with partners I've never met, babies are being added to the family, new jobs and new moves are the norm, and #bestdecade is spinning past while the country is going through a massive internal transformation. No matter how connected I stay to home, so much is happening without me, and it can be challenging to conceptualize the extent of the change. 

Even my own life sometimes feels as though it is in suspended animation. As if these two years are an experiment into another life that will cease to exist once I return to "reality." I can never be both here and there but I can never be only here nor there either. Space and time continue to morph as I build relationships I cherish across different oceans. But this life I live now, day in and day out, is my reality. I'm sitting in my house at my kitchen table in my village living out my existence. And when I go back to America this reality will not cease to exist. When I go back I will not truly go back to anything the way it was before but I'll find a new place in a new life that I will build for myself. The street signs may be the same, but not much else will. 

Sometimes it feels like I am hurtling forward and that new life will be here much too fast. I'm afraid of having to say goodbye or having to leave this life I love behind. Sometimes it feels as though I will never make it out of here to the other side. And time speeds and slows as it so chooses, out of my control. 

But for now I am trying not to exist in any way except now. To exist in the long work day, in the bureaucratic frustration, in the flirtatious exchange, or in the fearless dance party. My mind is racing forward while frozen in the past and all I can hope for is the moments where it keeps pace with the rest of the world.