Active Prevention of a Mid-Life Crisis February 26, 2009

 

The absolute worst thing about Facebook (besides all of those ridiculous zombie-vampire-pirate-ninja-baked-goods-lil’-green-patch applications) is that it feeds my monster impulse to compare myself to others.  Every status update and photo album is a potential morsel for it to gobble down.  This is not something I love about myself; it’s definitely something that I’m working on, but dude, how many engagement pictures, changed relationship statuses, and ultrasound photos can I look at before I articulate the obvious gap between my lifestyle and that of half of my peers?

I’ll tell you something a little embarrassing: I thought I would be married before I turned 22.  I know, right?  Reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye, making a conservative youth group my life in high school, and attending a Bible college where people joked about the female students earning their “MRS” degrees were all ingredients in my little cocktail of future wishes.  I don’t remember if I ever voiced my plan to anyone (dear Lord, I hope not) but when I was graduating high school I had it all mapped out in my mind.  First and second year of college I would be a social butterfly, just having fun, right?  Third year I would settle on one boy to date, our senior year we would get engaged and plan our wedding, and I would toss my graduation cap and my bouquet in the same month.

You may have guessed – this didn’t happen.  As it turned out, I had two failed relationships and then I was too busy trying to deal with all my emotional ish during my senior year to find another boyfriend, get engaged and plan a wedding.  

Instead, I planned a trip to Europe with a friend, scheduled for three days after graduation.  Then I worked at a camp all summer in Maryland.  In the past 3 years I have lived in California, Maryland, Australia, Mexico, Norway, and Germany.  I have visited 12 countries I have never been to before.  I have bobbed in the Dead Sea in Israel, danced around a Christmas tree in Norway, fed a kangaroo in Australia, attended Carnaval in Mazatlan, picnicked in France, and touched the remains of the Berlin Wall.  I spent a summer Down Under and a winter as close to the Arctic Circle as I ever want to get.  I have eaten a thousand new foods and smelled a million new scents.  I’ve met 19,762 people.  All between May 2006 and February 2009.

That’s pretty freaking amazing.  Then why, when I stumble upon an old friend’s Facebook account and discover she now has 2 kids and a baby on the way, do I feel like I’m lagging behind in the race of life?  Something (perhaps leftover from the 40s a la Mona Lisa Smile) tugs on my sleeve and tells me I better polish my heels and get a ring on my finger so I can pop out some babies before…I don’t even know what.  What?!  How crazy is that line of thinking?  

These are just fleeting thoughts.  But sometimes I do feel like I’m a few cars back in the train of life than others my age.  I told my friend Allison about this in an email the other day (she’s the one who traveled to Europe with me) and she had this to say: “Once we do settle down and have kids we will have thousands of experiences, memories and encounters that will get us through whenever it feels monotonous. I think that if I settled down and had kids right away I would have a pretty serious mid-life crisis.”  Aha!  Not only do I agree with her, but I think this fear of the monotonous, the fear of the mid-life crisis, that my sister Rachel always depicts in an image of her, middle-aged and standing at a kitchen sink doing dishes and gazing wistfully out the window, wondering what her life could have been like if only she hadn’t settled is part of what fueled my desire to travel in the first place.  

Disclaimer: I do not believe that everyone who marries young is settling.  No way!  If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that there isn’t a formula for when and how couples should get together and get married.  But for me, settling down before I had all these adventures really would be settling.  I think that one day I would have been washing dishes or changing a diaper or sewing a Halloween costume (ha!) and wondering what kind of adventures I could have had.

I’m so glad that in 20 years, when I’m folding the laundry or getting my car washed or doing some other mundane task, I can smile to myself and think about that time I paraglided off of a mountain in Austria or tossed coins into the Trevi fountain in Rome…I can revisit the conversations I’ve had with hundreds of beautiful, fascinating people.  But dude, it’s not like after this I’m going to stop traveling.  It’s just good to know that I’ve lowered my odds of freaking out when I turn 40.  Also, it’s pretty sweet to put all those pictures on Facebook.

I Know He’s Not Santa Claus, But… February 23, 2009

Dear God,

I would like one of these, please.  As I’m sure you know, my birthday is on July 3rd.  

Thank you,

Amen.

From the Field February 20, 2009

 

In case you want to know more about what I’m doing with YWAM in Germany, I posted my latest update in a page here.  See in the upper right hand corner?  It says “Germany Update.”  Just click there!  Ciao.  (Yeah, they say that in Germany, too).

The above picture is Heidelberg, which is about 20 minutes from the city where we live.  The picture below is of me on Valentine’s Day (ahem, single for the *cough* year in a row…)  We passed out roses that had tags reading “God Loves Mannheim.  We Do Too.”  In German, though.  :)

Quotable Friday, Vol. 31, Monday Mash-up Edition February 16, 2009

“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”

— Eugene O’Neill

The Great God Brown

This quote made me think of my New Year’s resolution for 2009, which I foolishly documented here.  I say foolish because, like most February reflections on New Year’s resolutions, mine carry a faint scent of shame.

After proclaiming that I wanted to “open my arms to life” in 2009, I set off on an adventure to Germany – the two month outreach phase of the DTS I’m staffing.  And guess what?  Yep, having trouble savoring life here, too.  Contentment sliding out of my grasp like a bar of soap, loneliness always hovering over my shoulder, moodiness and selfishness my constant companions.

But.  If there is one thing I’ve learned during my year in Europe, it’s that change is not an event, it’s a process.  Wait, I know what you’re thinking: duh.  (Or you would be, if people still said “duh”).  The thing is I’m not sure if I was unaware of this fact of reality or if I was just stubbornly unwilling to accept it.  I’m reminded of Donald Miller quoting his friend in Searching for God Knows What: “Reality is like fine wine.  It will not appeal to children.”  My childish need for instant gratification tends to make bold statements about changing myself, and then stamps its foot and pouts when that change takes more than a good night’s sleep.

So I’m beginning to accept that major personality and lifestyle transformation takes a few more moons than I want.  But way better than that lesson is the one I’ve learned about how Jesus sees our change.  I always pictured Him rolling His eyes and sighing loudly as I fall and pick myself up and say, “Now, this time I’ll really do it!”  In this case, reality is sweeter than fine wine, it’s more like honey.  The reality is that Jesus delights in the process of change.  He doesn’t get exasperated and He doesn’t scoff when we make optimistic resolutions. 

Anne Lamott (yes, her again) describes this beautifully in an essay about learning to forgive her dead mother.  At the end of the essay, Lamott takes a small step toward forgiveness by moving her mother’s ashes from the back of her closet to the mantel in her living room.  She says of Jesus, “I don’t think much surprises him: this is how we make important changes—barely, poorly, slowly.  And still, he raises his fist in triumph.”

It’s just another way we’re totally different, Jesus and I.  But I hope to learn to enjoy the journey of change with Him, to delight in the burning in our calves as we scale inclines, to love the wind in my hair when we run down hillsides with ease, to stretch out and rest in the valleys and be refreshed by the fine wine of reality with Him.

**Note: The above picture was taken on from a hilltop in the Beaujolais wine region of France, where I picnicked on Brie, baguettes, and wine and loved every minute of it.  I thought it was a good accompaniment to a quote about savoring life…

Ich Bin Ein Berliner February 12, 2009

I’m not going to lie…when I first arrived in Berlin, I thought I had never seen such an ugly city.  But somehow, it got in my blood.  When one of my best friends came to visit last week, I showed Berlin off with pride, and that made me realize how much I’d come to love the city in a few short weeks.  Berlin is fascinating and full of history, color, energy, and creativity.  It’s one of the only places in the world that I have felt like I could totally be myself – not thinner, smarter, prettier, richer, whatever. 

Here are some other impressions I’ve had of Berlin:

-I like that people will look you in the eyes when they pass you on the street.  I mean, yeah, if you smile at them they still look at you like you’re crazy…but hey, at least you acknowledged each other’s existence.

-As my friend Anne-Mai said, the official Berlin animal should be a dog, and not a bear.  I saw more dogs in my 4 weeks in Berlin than my 5 months in Norway.  They are everywhere, even on the trams!  None of them wear leashes, and none of their owners pick up their poop.  Seriously, walking up our street (nicknamed “Poop Street” and not by us) to the tram stop is like playing hopscotch, leaping and skipping to avoid the fresh piles laid every day.

 -Fredrichshain, the area we lived in, was so freaking cool.  It’s populated by yuppies and also anarchists who are against the system and form squatter communities in five story buildings that they completely cover in graffiti.  They even have steel doors to keep out the police when they try to evict them.  So there’s all these beautiful European buildings punctuated by amazing colorful graffiti.  Okay, and funny story about that: I was walking down our street and a guy was walking a little Jack Russell dog that started to jump up onto my friend’s legs.  The guy said, “Don’t jump, Pete!” and my ears perked up when I heard he was speaking English.  So we had this little conversation:

  Me: Hey, where are you from?

  Him: Canada.  You?

  Me: L.A.  

  Him: Oh, cool.  What are you doing here?

  Me: I’m on a missions trip.  What about you? 

  Him: [Laughing cynically] I’m an anarchist.  I live here [points to graffiti covered entrance to squatter flat]. 

  Me: Oh, cool.

  Him: [Sarcastically, as he enters his flat] Have fun.

Moving on…

-Berlin is SO full of history.  I totally want to learn so much more about it, especially about life in East Germany under the GDR.

-There’s a bunch of Starbucks locations in Berlin, but you know what?  It doesn’t matter, because you can’t freaking get iced green tea outside of the United States.  Boo.

-I love that Berlin has its own dialect, like they say “ick” instead of “ich” for “I.”  Like I went to a concert down the street from my place and the local band had a song called “Berlin, ick liebe dir” which is “Berlin, I love you” in the local dialect.  I bought the t-shirt.  

-I can’t say this definitively, but it seems like Berlin is devoid of “scenes”, at least for a metropolis with a thriving population of young people.  For instance, when I went to a ska/reggae show a couple weeks ago,  there wasn’t a certain type of person or style there.  There was every size, shape, color, and style there.  It’s so freeing!

Okay, that’s all I can think of right now because I’m watching “What Happens in Vegas” and it’s much funnier and more interesting when I’m not watching it on an airplane in the middle of the night! 

In closing, I think I can identify with JFK when he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”  Although, I’m still a little unclear on what he meant by that…

Pictures below.  If you want to see more, look at my Facebook albums.  Oh, and shout out to Katie, who flew all the way from Southern California (ahem, with an extended stopover in London) to Berlin to hang out for a couple days.  I love the way we keep meeting up all around the world!

My team on our first day in Berlin; that’s the Reichstag, the government building:

Starbucks at Brandenberg Gate – alas, alack, no iced tea.  :(  Too cold anyway.

Walking through the Holocaust Memorial 

Pretty buildings in our neighborhood of Freidrichshain and one of the punk squatter buildings - 

Katie and I in front of a chunk of the Berlin Wall…this is ranking up there with my favorite pictures of us!

 

There’s More to the Internet Than Facebook February 1, 2009

So you know how I’ve quoted Anne Lamott like, a hundred times on this site?  I didn’t bring any of her books with me on this trip, because when you can only bring two pieces of baggage for 8 months, you have to be a little selective about the reading material you bring.  So anyway, lately I’ve been craving Anne Lamott’s writing (as well as a quick jaunt into Narnia) and yesterday I made a fabulous discovery: on a whim, I typed “Anne Lamott online” into Google, and I found this.  An archive of essays she wrote for Salon Magazine.  Yessss.  If I didn’t have an important date with my journal, my Bible, and a cafe I would have sat there for hours reading all of the essays in one gulp.  

Okay, the point of this post: read some of these essays.  You will laugh, you might cry, you might shake your fist, you might be moved, and you might want to burn Anne Lamott at the stake for heresy.  That’s totally up to you.  But I know I’m not leaving you with much new content lately (dude, I’m on outreach)…so just take the time you would normally use for our dear lil Eeper and head on over here.  That will get you started.  Let me know your thoughts.