How Do You Measure a Year?

Moments of rest often find us rather than us finding them. It’s 8:00 p.m. on June 16th. My mom and two sisters should be arriving in 10 minutes. First kink encountered. On my way to the airport via bus, I received a static-y phone call from Tokyo, Japan. Their first flight left three hours late putting in a chain reaction of flight plan reconstructions. New arrival time: 1:00 a.m.

I’ve had “update my blog” on my to-do list for approximately a month, but it’s mentally been on the to-do list for an even longer period of time.

I titled this entry “how do you measure a year”, and immediately “Seasons of Love” from the musical RENT popped in to my head. Well, I suppose that in the course of my first year here I have gone through seasons of love so to speak. Summer’s heat bringing hard, tense times of exhausting preparation to settle in to my new home and job, autumn’s falling leaves bringing a realization that I too must shed certain things if I was going to flourish in being reborn and renewed in this place, winter’s surprise snow fall and surprises in the States, and spring’s renewal of not just the land but the spirit.

Job transitions were many in the past few years of my life, and I thought going in that this transition would, as a result of constant change, be fairly easy. In many ways, it was. In many ways, it wasn’t. While I was used to a constant change of working environments, I wasn’t used to having to change my community and network of friends. This proved harder to deal with than I realized. How does one start again after living in a place for seven years, especially when one was so different in year seven than in year one?

Ten months ago, I took this same bus route in reverse. I landed, walked through terminal three, met new coworkers and headed “home” via bus. Now, here I am boarding the bus, waiting in terminal three for familiar familial faces, ready to introduce them to my new life here. At times, well maybe most of the time, life is hard to take in when you really think about it.

Three months ago, I began to wrestle with the idea of what “life” was or is. I am a creature of habit and routine. I enjoy routine, and often times crave routine. Alarm sounds at 4:45. Coffee by 5:30. Bus at 6:45. Unlock classroom door at 6:55. Yet, surely there is more to life than just repeating said routine over and over. More to life than putting red marks on essays and vocabulary quizzes. More to life than spending another Saturday at Starbucks grading papers. But where does one insert ^more^ into her life? While the epiphany came three months ago, the plan of implementation has only started to materialize.

I wrote that in To Kill a Mockingbird Scout boasted, “Summer was their best season” because of all the delights it brought. In many ways, those are my thoughts. Summer has become a time for me to renew myself and quite possibly put in to action the overdue lessons from March.