Throwback: Truthful Observations About Returning Stateside
Truthful Observations About Returning Stateside (originally published on another blog on Sunday, August 19th, 2018, four days after returning from my year abroad)
Since returning home on Wednesday night after almost 24 hours of traveling, I've noticed a few things about my home country that I failed to remember when I left. My eyes feel fresher to this country's nuances:
The roads seem bigger and there is more ambient space for grass and trees amid the more-sprawling-than-England's suburbs. People are friendlier. Eye contact and lots of hellos. Cars, lots of them, along the road, startle me more, even though I noticed that overall Americans drive more cautiously than many British people. Big box stores, very few independent shops in the suburbs.
But then again...
I moved from a small city (York) back to a fairly large urban-suburban area (Towson/Baltimore). That's different from moving from a suburb to a suburb, or the countryside to rural America. These observations about my one home in comparison with my other home feel accurate, but they're just my sense.
All that makes me think: how much of what we think we experience as "truth" is actually our personal lens on the world?
This morning, for example, I went back to my home church for the first time in over a year. Ascension Lutheran is the church where my entire family has attended for well over two decades. Krissy works there part-time (in addition to teaching) and they were really supportive during my YAGM year abroad.
It was like sinking into a warm bath. After a year of struggling to like the church where I worked, St. Columba's, on an institutional level, it felt so good to return to the familiar. In its familiarity was beauty. The same people I sadly said goodbye to a year ago all gave me hugs and excited greetings. My jaw hurt from talking so much, people kept coming up after the service to my pew to say hello, and my sister and I only finally left the sanctuary when the lights got turned off.
In front of us by a couple of rows was a woman sitting by herself. She did not smile much or go out of her way to speak. A few people said hello to her. But mostly she was alone.
Last year, I never would have noticed her. I have my church crew - the families who know me, the friends who come to say hi, and of course my sister (we always sit in the back so we can talk). But now I did; I went up during the sharing of the peace to shake her hand. That's because for a full year I felt lonely and alone at St. Columba's, largely unnoticed, and I also watched how the church at large struggled to make anyone new feel welcome or appreciated (or even, for that matter, some members who had been there for ages who did not fit in).
Who and what else am I not noticing because I have not seen enough? It took a year away to realize just how much slips through my grasp. When I first arrived in England, I felt like a silent sponge. I didn't talk much but I noticed everything. Double yellow lines on the side of the road, new words, prices in pounds, different systems at grocery store check-outs, fascinating medieval and tudor-style buildings, street signs nailed to the sides of buildings instead of on posts, a nine-hundred year old church around the corner from my house, a community garden on a plot of land that used to be an ancient cemetary. All new, all noticed.
But that was my England experience. Those were the quirks that stuck out to me. Maybe someone else would say that's not the England they know and love. Maybe they noticed entirely different things about their England. Their truth of the place would be different.
Our truths come through our own personal lens. It's humbling and vitally important that we remember how narrow that lens really is, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. An acknowledged filter is a good start to grow and it's also inevitable, really. But the fact that we all see things our way, from the seat of our own experiences and our own backgrounds - that's indisputable. That is the truth.
The roads seem bigger and there is more ambient space for grass and trees amid the more-sprawling-than-England's suburbs. People are friendlier. Eye contact and lots of hellos. Cars, lots of them, along the road, startle me more, even though I noticed that overall Americans drive more cautiously than many British people. Big box stores, very few independent shops in the suburbs.
But then again...
I moved from a small city (York) back to a fairly large urban-suburban area (Towson/Baltimore). That's different from moving from a suburb to a suburb, or the countryside to rural America. These observations about my one home in comparison with my other home feel accurate, but they're just my sense.
All that makes me think: how much of what we think we experience as "truth" is actually our personal lens on the world?
This morning, for example, I went back to my home church for the first time in over a year. Ascension Lutheran is the church where my entire family has attended for well over two decades. Krissy works there part-time (in addition to teaching) and they were really supportive during my YAGM year abroad.
It was like sinking into a warm bath. After a year of struggling to like the church where I worked, St. Columba's, on an institutional level, it felt so good to return to the familiar. In its familiarity was beauty. The same people I sadly said goodbye to a year ago all gave me hugs and excited greetings. My jaw hurt from talking so much, people kept coming up after the service to my pew to say hello, and my sister and I only finally left the sanctuary when the lights got turned off.
In front of us by a couple of rows was a woman sitting by herself. She did not smile much or go out of her way to speak. A few people said hello to her. But mostly she was alone.
Last year, I never would have noticed her. I have my church crew - the families who know me, the friends who come to say hi, and of course my sister (we always sit in the back so we can talk). But now I did; I went up during the sharing of the peace to shake her hand. That's because for a full year I felt lonely and alone at St. Columba's, largely unnoticed, and I also watched how the church at large struggled to make anyone new feel welcome or appreciated (or even, for that matter, some members who had been there for ages who did not fit in).
Who and what else am I not noticing because I have not seen enough? It took a year away to realize just how much slips through my grasp. When I first arrived in England, I felt like a silent sponge. I didn't talk much but I noticed everything. Double yellow lines on the side of the road, new words, prices in pounds, different systems at grocery store check-outs, fascinating medieval and tudor-style buildings, street signs nailed to the sides of buildings instead of on posts, a nine-hundred year old church around the corner from my house, a community garden on a plot of land that used to be an ancient cemetary. All new, all noticed.
But that was my England experience. Those were the quirks that stuck out to me. Maybe someone else would say that's not the England they know and love. Maybe they noticed entirely different things about their England. Their truth of the place would be different.
Our truths come through our own personal lens. It's humbling and vitally important that we remember how narrow that lens really is, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. An acknowledged filter is a good start to grow and it's also inevitable, really. But the fact that we all see things our way, from the seat of our own experiences and our own backgrounds - that's indisputable. That is the truth.
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