Posts

hello, goodbye

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(A philosophy on saying “goodbye”)      I’ve always felt a lingering sadness at the way the Lord of the Rings trilogy ends. There’s such a bittersweet ache to seeing Frodo take off into the distance without Sam that it’s stuck with me from ages seven to nineteen. I think that it’s because it represents all the feelings of endings, and the sorrows of saying goodbye to a story you’ve fully loved, or a friendship you haven’t yet fully lived. It’s the same reason I unashamedly bawled my eyes out in a theatre this year to Avengers: Endgame- it’s sad to come to the end of something great. To know that what it’s been will never again be exactly the same. And most of life is exactly that: a series of ending moments. Moments that don’t ever come back the way they lived and breathed the first time.     I used to be dreadful at goodbyes, and dread changes (it probably has something to do with a childhood full of both of those things.) When I graduated the eigh...

thoughts from krakow

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     Five days ago I took a train by myself for the first time in my life. And two days ago I managed to make it from one European country to another by myself for the first time (if you need it, now is the moment for applause for Linden not getting lost or dying! Although I did totally not realize one of my trains was a connecting train.. so I did think I was very lost for a brief period of time... and that I might die.. but I didn’t!!) When I go home to the states in nine days I will be a very different person than when I set out at the beginning of the month.      In the midst of all my travels lately I’ve been thinking a lot about experiential learning. No matter how many times you explained public transport to me a month ago I wouldn’t have really understood how to get on the right train until I tried and messed up and succeeded in a tangible, experiential, way (which involved a confused train steward yelled at me in Czech that this was, indeed t...