Category: Ruminations

It’s been almost two years since I’ve posted on this blog. I’ve enjoyed maintaining this little plot of cyberland, but will say I’ve found it increasingly difficult to prioritize creating – writing – over the past years. Shall we blame it on social media, responsible for incessantly ramming insipid details and curated images into the brain? Why yes, we could do that. The glut of self-promoting media and contrived content certainly has reached a deafening roar in recent years. With everyone else shouting “look at me look at me LOOK AT ME,” I haven’t particularly felt the need to add my voice to the din. Quite uninspiring.

Realistically, though, I’ve been busy. I created this site nearly a decade ago when I had the most free time I’ll ever have in life. A junior in college, embarking upon a semester abroad with wide eyes and wide mind. Over the years, as I have explored and found my way in the world, this has been my space to capture and create, write and remember. Though ten years later I’m still growing and thinking and observing life with saucers for eyes, it’s become harder for me to take time out of living life to write about it, perhaps for fear of missing living another moment. Truly, if 2020 taught us anything, it’s to cherish the lived moments we have, and to be wholly present for them.

So on the two year anniversary of a total lack of input on this page, I grant you these words and with them the knowledge that I am alive and quite well. Perhaps one day I’ll catch you up on my assorted contemplations and the myriad adventures life has taken me on. But for now, I’ll just let this post relieve the self-imposed pressure to make my first post after two years a profound one. Also here are some trees.

Are you ready for yet another post in which I announce the complete overhaul of my geographic and cultural situation? Today is your day.

I’ve held out on any sort of announcement, because change feels less permanent if fewer people know about it. But hello, here I am, not in Costa Rica anymore, and not writing about it doesn’t make it any less true.

Now let’s dial back that tone of resignation and be clear: I chose to leave. The why was a compilation of factors. Even though I loved where I was working, it’s hard to find professional growth, development, and movement in a rural 400-person village. It’s hard to be away from your family as they go through harrowing medical problems, and to be away from your closest friends as they celebrate life’s milestones. It’s hard to realize that if you stay in the position you’re in, you’ll forfeit some of the dreams and goals that are dearest to you.

Even so, it’s possibly more frustrating to digest that that by virtue of your background and upbringing, you have access to more opportunities than your peers. Movement, after all, is a fantastic privilege.

So as I closed in on two years in San Luis and felt my toes itch and my mind wander, I wanted to quash what I viewed as this insatiable North American need for growth. In my mind, a need for growth and change was equal to discontent discontent. In San Luis, the attitude towards having any job – whether cleaning or cooking, management or milking cows – is gratitude. Gracias a Dios hay trabajo (“thank God there is work”) is the saying when the workload is heavy, or when the workload is light. It puts food on the table, clothes on the kids’ backs, gas in the motorcycle. I wanted very much for my existential crisis to stop flaring up, and be content for the rest of my life right where I was because I had food and shelter and relationships, and this was enough, it seemed, for everyone except me. I felt deeply ungrateful.

When I tried to express this guilt to my boyfriend, he looked at me incredulously and replied,

“What would be ungrateful is to not take an opportunity when it is offered to you.”

His parents have worked without complaint to put their two sons through a local bilingual school, because speaking English opens a plethora of opportunities in a community so touched by tourism. So to them, to accept an opportunity is not ungrateful; to turn down an opportunity is.

So with my mindset realigned, I accepted a position with a U.S.-based study abroad company that will hopefully continue to grow and shape me. In August, after over two years of calling San Luis my home, I packed up my bags and moved to…Massachusetts.

I knew the transition was going to be hard. With three months now under my belt, though, I guess I didn’t think I’d still have throbbing homesickness, which just serves as a testament to the love, grace, and humility I was surrounded with in San Luis.

I am beyond grateful for my years in San Luis, as they have shaped and molded me into the stronger, more thoughtful, more confident person that I am today. I am indebted to the people who treated me with unbridled kindness, and looked upon me as one of their own. I am thankful for a community that distilled life’s complex and conflicting recipes for happiness into simple ingredients: friends, family, and food. And while my current chapter of life calls me to this colonial tundra of a state called Massachusetts, don’t think for as second I’ve closed the book on San Luis.

I’ll be back. 🙂

The biggest obstacle to planning your future is not fear, nor indecisiveness, nor lack of commitment.

It is not having a chair tall enough for your desk.

This realization makes me a little concerned about my levels of grit and determination. I do not have to walk three miles for clean water, nor do I have cross a gorge on a rickety bridge to get to school. I simply have to stack a yoga mat, four placemats, used gym clothes, a backpack, and a blanket to reach staggering new heights – i.e., to rest my elbows on the table while typing.

I am feeling very empowered because I am reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, and after Chapter 1 (“The Leadership Ambition Gap”) I have already solved a seating problem that has dogged me for five months, and I have made popcorn IN A POT. I danced around the kitchen to the dull dings of the kernels bouncing about the pot. I was elated.

And it is times like these where I think my life is a farce.

If you’re asking why so serious?, it’s because Molly talked to her parents. This isn’t the first time this has transpired; nay, this is but a new episode in a series. After a lapse of x-number of months, I know to expect a thorough inspection of my life’s ambitions and plans. A “State of the Molly.”

It’s a good thing. I think.

I have been putting off and putting off confronting my next life step. First I blamed it on not having a functioning computer charger for two months. Then I blamed it on not having a functioning desk (hence today’s triumph). I feel like I am at the top of one of the staircases at Hogwarts: the choices for my next step swivel in and out of play. The staircases will briefly connect at some point – there’s a path to get somewhere – but how am I to choose even a staircase if I don’t know my final destination?

It’s time to whole-heartedly pursue this mystery destination. So I’ll start with the question posited by Ms. Sandberg (or really by the book Who Moved My Cheese?…whose title in and of itself rivals the following question):

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?