Homecoming

‘Welcome to Walmart!’

a little voice inside my head… ‘Welcome to the United States of America’

Maybe I had romanticized home a little bit too much.

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Maybe. Reading my past blogs would certainly give that impression. And basically, it was true. But, my change of heart in South America, sometime in April when I broke out a calendar and a calculator, was mostly owed to my complete impatience and contempt for my specific university. It wasn’t that Chile isn’t the US, it’s that UAI isn’t U of M.

That drove me a lot further up a wall than it probably should have. I hope I didn’t romanticize UM too much. I guess we’ll find out in September.

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What exactly is study abroad good for in the first place? I spent the vast majority of this blog trying in one way or another to answer that. It was a frustrating question. I even went so far as to propose an alternate study abroad plan; the assumption there is that I knew what it was good for and that my plan was better at providing it.

I had always planned on studying abroad; before I was even looking at colleges I knew that the right place had to have a good international program. If you had asked me why I was so bent on doing this, I probably would have been confused and said ‘just because’. Seriously.

After thinking and writing about it (and living it) for the past six months, I’m not sure that’s a bad reason at all.

It might actually be the only legitimate reason.

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Buddhism teaches that when we take action because we have expect that a certain result will be fulfilled, or that we should obtain some benefit from acting, we set ourselves up for unhappiness and profound dissatisfaction. The only way to truly experience life to take action simply for it’s own sake. In doing so, we actually get much more benefit than if we had expected to benefit in the first place. Because even if all our expectations and desires are fulfilled, we are still left with the unanswerable question ‘was it worth it?’ We are then forced to try to quantify an experience on an internal scale, set an arbitrary goal for what level of ‘goodness’ is ‘worth it’, and clearly the problems spiral out of control from there.

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People ask a lot of questions when you get back from a long trip. I understand. It’s almost impossible not to. But the questions themselves are equally impossible to answer. You can’t reduce an experience to a few words, or try to frame it with generalizations like ‘yes it was fun’ or ‘I learned a lot’ or any other standard-issue answers. You can’t do any better with a paragraph or a page or a hundred.

Although Mom hates it, I think my standard answer of ‘meh hmm wrrr ghhh’ to any question summarizes it better than anything else. I even answer my own questions like that. Just look at my blog.

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Here’s a common question: What was the best part? Counting the entire trip, hands down it was the plane descending into Buenos Aires on the first day. I wrote about it in late January in a post titled Arrival: Expectations and a New Perspective. It’s still my favorite post in the whole blog. Notice I used the word ‘expectations’ in the title. I concluded accurately in that post that for Argentina, I had no expectations at all. For one moment as the plane was landing, I felt free.

It’s hard to explain that when people ask.

The reason I suffered later on in Chile was the gradual relinquishing of that freedom. I wanted UAI to be more like UM. I wanted to be less gringo and more Chilean. I felt like I should be accomplishing more. I thought I was wasting my time.

I expected to gain more out of Chile than this.

What exactly did I want to gain? I couldn’t tell you for sure. But the trip did teach me that lesson pretty clearly. I now know why.

Just because.