save it

I figure if I don’t write something here soon, I never will. I feel a responsibility to sum up .. well, something. I’ve been home for almost 5 days now, mysteriously skipped any kind of jet lag, and feel the most intense gratitude for my family, my friends, space, my coffee maker, and hot showers. I’ve felt like a little kid every morning, I can’t believe I live here.(!) I’m considering trekking to another country 2 months out of every year, partly to re-experience this.
This trip has given me so much- a greater capacity to understand, be patient, see things without a lens of idealism, a calm I didn’t know I had. I learned in a very real way to respect people who are different than me; I realized how hard that is. My knee-jerk response is often to decide things are wrong, inefficient, or ridiculous instead of Different (and probably beyond my understanding at that point). I learned a little bit of how hard it is to be a foreigner, to be treated like my ways of doing things are wrong, inefficient, ridiculous. I gained a fair bit of cynicism (still leveled with some leftover idealism), saw the frustration of working toward justice, and realized, like the sky had opened up, that people whose case studies I had read, the ones who are suffering, are real people. The laugh, they cry, they live, and they try to heal. They don’t need my pity, they deserve my respect.
Finally, I learned that if you want to save the world, you should start with the world you live in right now. I’m sure you’ve heard that before, but it took me two months traveling on the other side of the world to really figure it out.
I don’t think I would have done this any differently if I could go back. It was a delicious soup of difficulty, pink bubbles, doing admin, overcrowded trains, curry with roti, mosambi juice, festivals, hotel hunting, chai, decompressing in Coffee Day, markets, making friends from everywhere imaginable, finding gaudian angels in every city (thank you Roonshing, Abbas, Salman, Steve, and Vishal!), skipping dinner in favor of dessert, learning the fine art of crossing the street, book trading along the way, trying to lean Hindi then giving up, quotes of the day (“I can’t think of the word, that whole scenario when the rickshaw driver wanted to take us to his shop…A SCAM!!”), balancing work with play, and trying not to be a stupid American.
It was pretty amazing. So thanks for following me, for your emails and comments, for picking up my phone calls at 7am, for encouraging and supporting me, for your faith and love and belief in me. It was huge, and I am so thankful to be living life with you. Much love.
Sara