Monday, July 28, 2008

Making decisions... or not

There is a topic that has been on my mind lately: decision. Ever since I can remember, I was always making my own decisions. I believe my own family will tell you that I’ve always been a very independent person who at an early age took control of his own life. I’ve always wanted to control what happens to me. I think that many of us can relate to this. I really believe that this is a product of being an American. A couple weeks ago when we volunteers met our Moldovan school directors we had a conference where we discussed several topics. One topic was ranking our values as Americans and as Moldovans. Not surprisingly, the American group ranked “Individualism” as the number one value in America and “Tradition” as last. The Moldovans did the complete opposite: they ranked “Tradition” first and “Individualism” last. I cannot say that it was too surprising to see. After all, Moldova is a country torn between two worlds and is still recovering from Soviet rule where individualism was basically punished. And we Americans? We’re a country of immigrants without any sort of conventional tradition and we are conditioned in school to be the best we can be as individuals and to aspire to outshine others.

So where am I going with this? In the past couple of years, I have made a dramatic change in my life (albeit totally by accident) where I have just let things happen without interfering with my own wants or desires. I remember when I first got into Teach For America right out of college and being a little disappointed that I got Phoenix, my 2nd choice for placement. I mean, I actually considered not doing that great program because of something so trivial as location. And to be completely honest with myself, I think the ultimate factor in my actually doing Teach For America was the prestige attached to it. I knew that it impressed others. Granted, I grew to truly understand the value in teaching my students, but even during my time teaching, I still exercised an enormous amount of control regarding everything from my classroom to my social life. In short, I was incredibly uptight and as much as I prided myself on being open-minded, my mind consistently slammed shut on my own life.

Then came the recruitment director position with Teach For America. Many of you have heard me complain about this job a lot, and I’m sure I could still find things to critique about it until the sun comes up, but looking back I am extremely grateful that I had that opportunity to fail so miserably at something. Going into that job, I cared about nobody but myself. And what is so strange is that I, along with many of my colleagues, fooled myself into believing that I was doing something incredibly selfless. Being alone in Seattle, working all by myself on something that required so much independence, really allowed me the opportunity to peel back the layers of who I was and what I determined in my life. There were so many days that I would be sitting at a table at the University of Washington asking myself, “Why the hell am I here and what is preventing me from actually getting up and leaving?” That job ran it’s course and as many of you know, I did in fact eventually get up and leave. But, in retrospect, it was the evolution of myself – not the slow demolition of my career – that really surprised me the most.

Since being in Moldova, I have surprised myself many times with my true open-mind and willingness to relinquish of control. Even before coming here, I marked on my application (while in the final few months of my previous job, mind you) that I would be willing to go anywhere. It’s a big world, and now the admissions team over at Peace Corps headquarters could pretty much close their eyes, point to a map and send me to that country. Moldova? No, Moldova! And now I’m going to a random village that I had no control over choosing. But what is so wonderful about life is that no matter where I would have ended up going to, I know it would have been wonderful! You can’t let yourself get in the way of having truly incredible things happen to you. Sometimes you just have to let go of the reins and give someone else a try. It’s amazing once you let life take control the incredible things that can happen to you.

Ok, so I realize this is now beginning to start to sound a little too “Jesus, Take the Wheel”. However, for some people, it is religion that let’s them live their lives freely (while for others, religion might keep them locked up as slaves). Some may define the thinking as spiritual. I just define it as life. Life is going to happen regardless of how much you try to control it – so live it. And like The Beatles say, let it be.

No, I’m not missing the irony in all of this: that after coming to an incredibly restrictive and impoverished country, I finally feel truly liberated. I am grateful for this and I feel incredibly privileged to be doing the work that I am doing in this country. There may come a time where I feel that it’s no longer working out and decide to come back early, or it may be the case that my work is not done after two years and I stay two more. Regardless of what happens next, it will be the right decision. And same to you, whatever happens tomorrow, good or bad, it’s the right way because it’s what happened.

Life is all about attitude.

No comments: