One last post from home...

New Zealand taught Liz and I a lot: how to travel with non-vegetarian, whiskey drinking Scotsmen (a HUGE lesson in itself!), how to drive on the left side of the road, how to properly buy a car….

We learned a lot of valuable lessons. Earlier today, I was going through some old word documents that I had written while I was in New Zealand but never posted on the blog. One entry in particular was entitled, “Lessons”. Here is a small selection from this document:

When you go out backpacking, go into the wild, leave for an epic trip, you often hope that it will bring some sort of order, some sort of inner peace and understanding to your life.

Especially if you’re 22 and trying to figure out your life.

However, this rarely happens. (Well, at least for me.)  Life’s ponderings are rarely solved by a 15 mile hike or 3 day road trip. Sometimes I come home more at peace, but still with the same problems, the same questions.

This trip was different.

It might have been because we weren’t able to be home for Christmas.

It might have been because we haven’t been able to keep in contact as much as we’ve wanted with our family and friends.

It might have been for lack of a proper measuring cup.

WHO KNOWS.

Anyways. This is a list of what I have learned:

1.)   I don’t want to go to PA school any more. I want to go back to school and get a Masters in Public Health.

2.)   I want to get back together with Colin when I get home. I love him. From our first date when he showed up with a bleach stain on his shirt and we listened to live bluegrass music while drinking cheap beer out of cans and rode our bikes and sat in trees in the dark to the day he left for Mississippi, I was happier than I’ve ever been. It’s been five months to the day that he left and I still think about him at least thirty times a day.

3.)   Even though my job will hopefully involve traveling, I will always be home for Christmas. Always.

4.)   That’s it.

5.)   I thought this list would have been bigger.

6.)   [sigh]

I never posted this entry because I found it pretty lame. It wasn’t an amusing anecdote; it wasn’t full of lessons others could apply to their own lives. How many people who read this blog would really care that much that I had switched my studies? Or care that I had decided that I for sure wanted to get back together with Colin? Adults are always thinking, “Oh. A boyfriend.” You hear all the time from people, “Yea – guys come and go. You need to think about yourself and what you want in life.” This entry just seemed…well. I don’t know. Kind of little.

But that’s wrong. There’s a lesson that I learned that can be shared. A lesson that people CAN apply to their own lives.

And it has to deal with lesson no. 2.

I almost lost someone when I got home from NZ.  While in NZ, I had let someone get away, someone who had earlier become my best friend, someone I had said made me feel “beautifully happy”, someone who was a truly good person, someone who had been there for me the entire time.

I’ve learned that you can’t just give up on something because it’s hard or because it’s easier and less painful and less scary to just try and forget.  It might be hard, SO hard, but if deep down you know it’s truly right – you can’t be scared and you’ve just got to stick with it and make it work.

Before Colin and I broke up when he moved to Mississippi and I traveled to NZ, we would read together a chapter of the children’s book, “The Little Prince” every day.  Below is an excerpt that I think sums up what I’m trying to say:

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much humbled.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.”

And he went back to meet the fox.

"Goodbye," he said.

"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

"It is the time you have spent on your rose that makes your rose so important."

"It is the time I have spent on my rose--" said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . ."

"I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

And THAT is the lesson that New Zealand really taught me: to recognize when relationships with others are truly good, when things are right, and then to work hard to keep them that way.