Reflections on 2006

Reflections, lessons learned, and memories from 2006:

It's hard to believe the year is through and yet looking back over the past 12 months in seems crazy that so much happened.

I started out the year looking towards a semester in Washington DC which was full of wonderful enriching experiences from living with 3 fabulous roommates to interning at the Middle East Institute and going to programs and conferences all over the city. I learned so much. It's nice to feel like all of my reading and listening certainly paid off, as I feel my understanding of international relations, politics and the Middle East increased tremendously during my stay. As well, though I realize there is still a huge amount to learn I think I have a more realistic view of how things work in DC, job opportunities, and the possibility of a future "in the beltway" life after my 5 months living right off the orange line. (Ah, Metro. How I miss thee.)

I learned I like the pace of daily work life. I love mass transportation. I love having a library a few metro stops away. I love having people around me who read the newspaper daily, know what's going on in the world, and challenge me to understand the world in different ways. I love hearing different languages when I walk down the street. And most importantly my love affair with our nation's capital city did not dwindle while I was there. But I did learn that its important to have a community around you. Having 3 wonderful roommates to come home to made the experience feel both safe and more fun. I enjoyed finding a church home that I enjoyed and getting to know a few people at my internship.

After DC I came home (albeit somewhat reluctantly) and intern at UIndy in the International Studies office and designed a program for almost 50 international students who came to stay for 6 weeks during the summer. This was a challenging experience which for all its bitter moments I think was important for me. It taught me a number of things about leadership, about relationships between people, and also how to deal with what I perceived as failures in some respects. I think I will always look back on the experience as one of those bridge times that is tinged with both regret and pride, lessons and pain. Yet, I also have to remind myself of the job that came from working directly with the students and the fun moments that I did have with them whether driving to and from Walmart, going to Chicago, or making middle-of-the-night hospital runs. That internship also should have taught me the lesson about the hazards of putting myself under too much stress.

Alas, I am stubborn and ignored that lesson...my unfortunate reward was this past semester. Biggest lesson of the fall: mixing 19 credits, an honors thesis, a campus-wide voting campaign, a job at the Writing Center, being editor of the SALT Shaker, living in an intentional Christian-living community, pushing paperwork for a semester abroad plus friendships, a realtionship, homework for 19 credits-worth of class, bible study, and various other projects that came up along the way = a very very very bad idea.

So what did I learn?

Breakdowns are messy but sometimes necessary.
Friends who stick by you when things suck are treasures.
ITunes is a wonderful diversion.
One can write an honors thesis amidst a stressful semester with the help of a bit of focus, many books, many hours of despair, ITunes, caffeine, and perhaps skipping a few classes.
Taking a 9:00 am gen/ed requirement pass fail encourages skipping.
Lattes have a profound effect on me and some of them do taste good.
Failure happens...and while it is painful and sucky, its the only way to learn sometimes.
I can only edit 7 papers in a row before becoming grumpy.
Truth commissions are fascinating. And the study of transitional justice just so happens to combine many of the things I love to study.
Sometimes even if you try really hard you cannot change the status quo and you definitely can't do so with a committed team. And it's really not worth trying to keep a project going by yourself.
Asking for help is okay. So is being angry or sad. But like everything there is a balance and even when the going gets tough if you ignore the balance too long everything does fall apart.
I lose things when I'm stressed.
Putting up a hammock does not enduce spontaneous relaxation.
Wrapping paper can be wallpaper in dorms.
Egg nog makes a party.
I can spend more than 12 hours straight in the Christopher Center.
Sometimes I hate Valpo.
Sometimes the idea of quitting everything is very appealing. And when it is most appealing the only question that can be asked: is after two weeks of quitting everything will I be happier in that place?
God is big enough to handle anger. But he's also big enough to handle confusion, despair, denial, and prayer. And he does have a plan (Okay I haven't learned that last one. That's just my hope).
Every semester ends. And when it does you get to pack up what has been your life and start something new. And though I know its the only real time we get to do that in our lives...I've never been more thankful of this fact than this semester.

And now after two weeks of Christmas break. I'm reminded that no matter what we think of ourselves and our values and high philosophic ideals...life looks different on the couch with your family around.

So the year ends. Here are a few things I believe/know/think right now.

• Communities are the building blocks of society. Different ideas of how communities should work, how they should be organized, who should have power and money and why, how things get done, and how conflicts begin continues to be the basis of most of what both fascinates and perplexes me.
• The field of international relations fascinates me. World poltics, governance, conflict...all of it is such an intriguing mix of formality, spontanity, history, culture, miscommunication and misunderstanding, obstinancy, economics, power, chance, and change. Now after a few classes in IR basics, the fact that there are so many different lenses through which people view, explain and predict international relations...I feel like I'm hooked all the more. Everytime I feel like finding something else to study, something pulls me back - globalization, feminist theory, just war theory, transitional justice, economic development, post-conflict reconstruction...I just wish I knew which direction I was being pulled.
• The World's Problems: Peace is only achievable by mass cooperation of people all over the world. Solving many of the world's problems (hunger, AIDs, sweatshops, nuclear proliferation, etc) requires a similiar feat. Until we learn how to do that better we have to continue with the system of the status quo as slow, ignorant, and unwieldy as it is. If I could pick the way of the future, we would continue to build international institutions like the UN and invest our resources and diplomacy there to make the system efficient and productive. Yet, while I am of the international institutionalist liberal strain...I understand the need for a measure of realism, and I am torn by the real need for nation-building in the United States. We need leaders to be able to reach into the problems facing our nation in the 21st Century, stop lollygagging and really solve the health care crisis, sort out the immigration disaster, end the practice of hedging our bets with the budget, fix our education system and change the way Americans learn, promote fair economic strategies, and lead the country and making some decisions about our country's values. How they are going to do that? I have no bloody idea. But for right now people like me can put their hopes in people whose leadership is more liberal and more polished than George W. Bush's and hope the rest falls in line. When it doesn't, maybe a new wave of leaders will be born.
• Making Things Right: [See end of last past] It's not always possible to make things right. But it is always necessary to try if you have the strength and the opportunity. Sometimes the simple act of trying can be very powerful and brings about an opportunity for things to be made right that never would have been. Sometimes it doesn't.
• I am a proponent of restorative justice rather than retributive justice.
• The arts enrich society. I believe we as people need music, film, art, theater, literature. We need artists, musicians, and writers to push our society in new directions, to remind of us of what is important, and to show us how we are reflected worldwide.
• My attitude towards failure and success are more existenstial than ever before. I say this somewhat ashamedly as this may simply be because I am young and finding my life changing at a rapid pace. But either way here's what I believe: Sometimes things are and sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes we as humans interepret reality as failure or success when they are neither. Sometimes we ignore failure when we should not and sometimes success is impossible. Either way, we still have to think carefully about what success is and then work towards it. Otherwise, our actions would seem to be meaningless. We can't ignore failure, nor can we escape it...though all of us discover it at different times which I think explains differing levels of arrogance at times. If we learn from both our successes and failures we'll be better off.
• Loss is simply painful. Growth after loss is never simple but not always painful.
• The future resists being planned. And I'm happy to say that I'm okay with it not being planned most of the times these days. Does that mean I wouldn't like to know whether I'm going to grad school or going to be able to find a job or whatever in the next few years...hell no. And yet, life without a plan has its own allures and takes a way a thick line of stress off the spine so I'm going for it as much as I can. But it would be helpful if people would stop asking the million dollar question after learning my major: "So what are you going to do with that?" GAH.
• Faith in God is an absure mix of simple and complicated, confusing and clear, frustrating and joyess. Hopefully I'll figure out a bit more in the close eventuality.

I'm 20 years old and still trying to decide whether I'm suppose to live like I'm going to be 80 or only 25. I get confused about the call to live simply and the call to not waste. I want to help bring about change but it sometimes seems impossible when the only people who get to change the world on a large scale (typed with some facetiousness) have a masters degree, a PhD and job experience. Changing on a local level seems natural and obvious but would be a lot easier if everyone was in SALT. I get tired a lot and am hoping my old level of energy kicks in. I like being the host but get nervous as the guest. I don't like being onstage unless I'm not acting or performing and I know what I'm talking about. Since that last part hasn't really happened yet most public appearances are tinged with a bit of purple embarassment. I'm learning more about my family and feeling a bit secure and a bit out of place. I enjoy watching my siblings grow up. But sadly still look about 16. I don't wish I was 21 so I could get drunk but I would like a nice glass of wine so that I can fall asleep. I get frustrated when things aren't done well but am starting to realize that frustration does not have to be an impetus towards changing it or doing it myself. I like an approrpiate level of stress as motivation but can't handle the "everything is hanging over my head" kind. My friends are precious to me. I'm going abroad in 16 days.

MTR Strikes Again: The Last Kiss

I took a seminar this past fall entitled "Making Things Right."

Now the theme follows me everywhere.

Today, I watched a movie I had picked up at the store entitled The Last Kiss. I knew nothing about it except that it starred Zach Braff and Rachel Bilson. I figured it for a light chick flick.

Instead, I watched the screen for 115 minutes and found myself not only laughing and enjoying the film, but also staring at the raw honesty depicted on the screen.

The film follows a number of couples, most around age 30 (with the exception of an older couple exquistely played by Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson) as their relationships crumble for one reason or another. Yet they are woven together in such a way that the true story is about relationality in general.

The characters are human, none of the Hollowoodizing, junky, fairytalelike characters. These characters make mistakes, yell, cuss, laugh, cry, and slam doors. They are strong, they are vulnerable, they are broken. They seem to truly represent people.

Too often characters in making things right tales seem so far away - too dramatized, or historic, or simply so fantastical that its hard to really identify with them. We take their lines and keep them as our favorite quotes as if they guide our lives in some way. Whether in books or movies, we tend to gravitate towards these characters and hold them up as characters who figured it out. Whatever it is at the moment. Yet, they don't stick. At the end of the day they are simply fantasy. Their wisdom doesn't hold true in real life where relationships are hard, friendships fall away, and the true meaning of family seems startingly confused.

This movie struck me as the opposite. It is a story of these people's relationships at a crucial time in all of their lives. It shows their mistakes, their would-be failures. It shows people succumbing to temptation, confronting failure, being paralized by fear, suffering pain and loss, realizing regret, practicing forgiveness... This film acknowledges that relationships are hard and that sometimes they don't work out. But most importantly shows that when relationships do work it doesn't just happen by magic, they take work and communication and honesty and strength and forgiveness. And sometimes even in relationships that strive for perfection in all these areas still fall apart when something else goes wrong.

At the end of the film, some of them "made things right" in Hollywood terms and some didn't. But that wasn't the point. The point was the journey, the raw honesty, the pain, the struggle, the discovery, and the power of relationships, of friendships, of family. The power of people to love, and to hurt, and to forgive.

I think this film represents the idea that not all things can be made right. At least not in the "fairytale, everyone is happy, everything is just, everything is restored" sense. Yet, I do believe that sometimes the only way to make things right is to realize that the past cannot be. Sometimes coming to terms with that fact and finding a way to deal with the new reality is the only way to make the present right. But whether this also makes the past right...I'm not so sure. I think the movie's message is that it is ultimately a choice.

Will the person wronged forgive and allow the past to be made right in the scope of the present? Will the wrongdoer attempt to make things right? If one of the parties refuses, can the other still make things right? Can things be made right without truth, vulnerability, communication, strength, and life?

Composing a Life

An Excerpt from Mary Catherine Bateson's Composing a Life:

"In a stable society, composing a life is somewhat like throwing a pot or building a house in a traditional form: the materials are known, the hands move skillfully in tasks familiar from thousands of performances, the fit of the completed whole int eh common life is understood...Today, the materials and skills from which a life is composed are no longer clear. It is not longer possible to follow the paths of previous generations. This is true for both men and women, but it is especially true for women, whose whole lives no longer need to be dominated by the rhythms of procreation and the dependencies that these created, but who still must live with the discontinuities of female biology and still must balance conflicting demands."

"The model of an ordinary successful life that is held up for young people is one of early decision and commitment, often to an educational preparation that launches a single rising trajectory...Graduation is supposed to be followed by the first real job, representing a step on an ascending ladder. We don't expect long answers when we ask children what they want to be when the grow up, any more than we expect a list of names in response to questions about marriage. In fact, assumptions about careers are not unlike those about marriage; the real success stories are supposed to be permanent and monogamous. These assumptions have not been valid for many of history's most creative people, and they are increasingly inappropriate today. The landscape through which we move is in constant flux...Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers. Just as it is less and less possible to replicate the career of a parent, so it will become less and less possible to go on doing the same thing through a lifetime. "

"The twentieth century has been called the century of the refugee because of the vast numbers of people uprooted by war and politics from their homes and accustomed lives."

"In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time...Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain."

"I found myself looking again at a patchwork of achievements both personal and professional and questioning how they fit together; whether they composed - or began to compose - a life; whether indeed the model of improvisation might prove more creative and appropriate to the twentieth century than the model of single-track ambition."

"Change proposes constancy: What is the ongoing entity of which we can say that it has assumed a new form? A composite life poses the recurring riddle of what the parts have in common."

"Just as change stimulates us to look for more abstract constancies, so the individual effort to compose a life, framed by birth and death and carefully piece together from disparate elements, becomes a statement on the unity of living. These works of art, still incomplete, are parables in process, the living metaphors with which we describe the world."

---Mary Catherine Bateson, excerpts from "Emergent Visions" in Composing a Life


Echoes of place. Globalization (Friedman's The World is Flat) and Gender Transformation (Taber's Wanting all the Right Things).

Place & Pamuk

I've recently been on a bit of a Pamuk binge.

Here I am referring to recent Nobel Prize-winning Turkish journalist Orhan Pamuk who is known for such novels as Snow and My Name is Red, as well as the memoir Istanbul. My father snatched up these three books before he embarked upon travels to Turkey and Greece last spring and ever since they have been sitting upon the shelves of the study/my room taunting me because I had not had a chance to sit and read them yet. Thus the Holiday break Pamuk binge.

Though Pamuk's writing brings up a plethora of issues and problems, not least of which is the political and social melancholy of Turkey, my mind grabbed hold of one particular theme that is woven throughout his writings: the significance of place.

This theme began to intrigue me after reading some of Wendell Berry's essays in which he lifts up the significant connection between land and people, of home, and of working to strengthen the local communities that have shaped us. Echoing Gandhi, Berry (and Pamuk perhaps) seems to make "place" the focus of problem-solving, vocation, life sustenance and the answer to all meaning-of-life questions. Okay, they don't suggest that all of life's questions can be understood in the context of place. But for these men, the "places" in their lives have been the lenses through which they have understood the world, determined their vocations, undertaken their work, and discerned the meaning of their lives. Place is no small thing.

For Pamuk, the place is Istanbul.

"Istanbul's fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." -Istanbul (pg 6)

Such is this connection that his memoirs cannot be complete without describing both his life and the city he has lived his entire life in.

"The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own."
(pg 6)

This connection between place and life…of land and people…triggers so many complexities. Questions of community and society. Problems of country and allegiance…

"At least once in a lifetime, self-reflection leads us to examine the circumstances of our birth. Why were we born in this particular corner of the world, on this particular date? These families into which we were born, these countries and cities to which the lottery of life has assigned us - they expect love from us, and in the end, we do love them, from the bottom of our hearts - but did we perhaps deserve better? -Istanbul (pg 7)

…history, civilization, art, music…

"If we see our city in black and white, it's partly because we know it from the engravings left to us by Western artists: the glorious colours of its past were never painted by local hands. There is no Ottoman painting that can easily accommodate our visual tastes. Nor is there a single piece of writing or work in today's world that can teach us how to take pleasure in Ottoman art of the classic Persian art that influenced it...when magazines or schoolbooks need an image of old Istanbul, they use the black-and-white engravings produced by Western travelers and artists." -Istanbul (pg 39-40)

It is fascinating to me how Pamuk translates this need and desire for place into also an explanation for the misunderstanding between peoples.

"Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them?"
- Snow (pg. 259)

It’s as if place and life and culture are all intertwined so tightly, that if we don’t understand how people live in another city, another culture, in a sense another world, we are also incapable of understanding their sufferings, their joys, their views.

My first reaction to this is one of thoughtful fascination. Firstly, because this is an explanation of the clash between civilizations that is rooted in culture, in empires and cities and communities. An explanation that fiercely puts the diversity of peoples and life at the focus, and calls for the need of understanding between peoples. Though, not without providing a base of pessimism in regards to whether this can be accomplished, and perhaps an idealistic sense of hope…

It is also fascinating because I’m not sure what this says about today…when globalization is mobilizing people to new places, new homes, and new identities...when the borders that we have often seem so superficial and archaic...when the economic, political, and societal forces at play make it impossible to see a world where people would be rooted to one place and in fact dissuade this option in favor of choice, modernization, and the market.

Yet, this is perhaps most intriguing in the sense that for people interested in the world, in other cultures, in striving for justice, and making change...this concept of place is simultaneously a recipe for a success, a diagnosis for failure, and a deep philosophical quandary.

A recipe for success in that by making place your focus, by seeking to understand those around you, and make your own unique contribution to society through your community, one should be able to lift up your neighbors and take a stab at truly resolving some of the problems that torment society.

[My query to this recipe: if we all looked inward to our own communities, would not the communities that lack such leaders, resources, and power still be left out in the cold?]

A diagnosis for failure because of the limits of history and the limitless today. For example, Pamuk demonstrates that Turkey is haunted by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and demoralized by the Westernization of their culture. There can be no changing the past. Nor is there soon to be a halt to the economic and societal globalization that are homogenizing cities and erasing cultural identity worldwide. Yet within history and modernity is widespread misunderstanding and clashes between the truths and traditions of world cultures. Reconciliation of ideas seems impossible. Yet conflict is deemed terrible.

"Now one could understand us from so far away." -Snow (pg. 426)

A deep philosophical quandary because the above contradicting views still beg questions: where are we without place, without home, without roots? what will become of new generations without a collective consciousness rooted by place? is it good/bad or simply different for the world to have mass migration and people who make traveling, moving, and exchanging identities their place in the world? what is the true importance of place and are we losing it?

I am certainly not sure. And unfortunately neither is Orhan Pamuk.

"I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems [in the context of problems of religious tolerance in Turkey]. Anyone who believes there is a simple solution to these problems is a fool -- and probably will soon end up being part of the problem. I think literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. That's what makes writing novels interesting. It's what makes writing a political novel today interesting."
-Orhan Pamuk, in an interview with New York Times' Alexander Star