A Hard Rain

Life was hard in West Columbia, it was hard in Austin, and it’s been hard in Kazakhstan. When times get hard, I tend to preoccupy myself with dreams of an easier life for me and mine after the passage of x-amount of years. Doesn’t time fix everything? No? I’ve recently discovered a more assertive approach to getting through these proverbial “hard times,” namely by resisting the urge to lose myself in petty distractions and delusions of an easier life so that I won’t slack on what needs to get done here in the now.

I look around at my friends and host family, and suddenly I don’t think that my life is so hard. The ironic flipside to that is that some of those friends and host family members would come back at me with, “It isn’t so hard for us either!” Comparisons are futile when hardness of life is the variable. All we have are our own experiences and the way that we feel in the aftermath.

And now it’s confession time. Since mid-April I’ve been slacking, and it took a really “hard” eight weeks for me to realize it. I’ve felt useless and lonely. I’d even go so far as to say that I felt abandoned at times. I’ve also felt so elated and full of love that I thought I would spontaneously combust because I couldn’t adequately communicate it to anyone, not even in English.

I’ve seen so many awful and amazing things in the past 2 months, and I’ve done nothing but feel sad or inconsequential to it all. It’s one thing to accept that nothing can be done to improve a situation (good or bad). It’s another thing to sit at my desk paralyzed with grief because the world is such a horrific and wonderful place, and I can’t find a comfy spot in it.

People have drifted in and out my reality with grand, sparkling entrances and tragic exits. Their impacts are intense and probably everlasting. But I am simply here. Just humpin’ it, as Woody Guthrie would say. It doesn’t pay to be too much of a thinker or a dreamer in times like these. It also doesn’t pay to become so absorbed in sensibility that we forget the job we’ve set out to do. We’ve got to work through the “hardness,” try not to lose sight of personal goals, remember relationships, and never forget that as inert individuals we’re not even blips on the world’s radar.

I’m sorry, World. The non-accomplishments of late have built up, but the slump’s over. I am now resolved to get up off of my thang and live whole-heartedly again.

Louisa, Me, and Demira (Host Family)