Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology
She could not stay here any longer. Touching the things of her infancy and childhood, the constantly coursing and seething water and the rocks covered with slime, she sensed that she was pushing herself away from them, breaking natural links forever, yet at the same time she was engraving these things in her memory, so that many years later she might find strength them in a moment of weariness...


Probably she already understood a thing or two herself: it is impossible, after all, to go away and to return just like that; never again would she be the person she used to be, neither on the knoll where strawberries grow, and sometimes raspberries, nor in the refreshing water of the pond, though this quiet glad would surely entice her more and more as the years went by, and each homecoming would be a return only to the past, to the violet clover, to the rock in the millpond and to the three oak trees, because there would no longer be such things in her life.

-Juozas Aputis, The Glade with Life-Giving Water
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Question: how much of us change when we live away from home?  And how much of us remains the same?
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Found this book chucked in the toilet cabinet in the Residences--some kid had thrown it away and the cleaners had salvaged it.  Kept it.  I found it lying alone in the toilet store cupboard.
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A best friend once complained how when he returned home after six months of student exchange, everyone was quick to slot him back to the person he was before he left.  "Life here wants to treat me as it did before I escaped" he gripped, "And, selfish as it may sound, I will not stand and accept that.  Accepting it is adapting to it and adapting to it, is tantamount to forgetting."


Tantamount to forgetting.  Those are hard words to play by--but they ring with a certain truth.  When I came back from my semester-long student exchange in Holland,  no one seemed willing or interested in listening to my stories.  They asked for the sake of asking, but I could tell the questions were polite ones--because just as I started talking, that familiar, absent glaze quickly filled their eyes.  They weren't really interested--they wanted to continue living their own lives, sticking to their own thoughts, mulling over their own matters.


Which made me realise, maybe the life abroad is really a solipsistic one indeed.  And maybe it's necessary to have a tempered self-consciousness in order to make that very endeavor successful.  Temper your change to anticipate being slotted back into the same mould when you return.  The changes that we go through shouldn't push us to expect certain reactions, actions and attitudes of acknowledgement from others.  If we react with disappointment to the convenient actions, maybe it means we just haven't lived or understood enough.


What is it to understand enough, though?


I'm thinking it's about what you know you have learned, and how those lessons have made you better no matter how painful.  It's also not just about being better towards yourself, but towards the people around you too (service).  To me, maybe that should mean what being out there means.


Living is self-centric--and maybe its true fulfillment paradoxically means serving others, in order to serve self.


Thoughts?