With just a few weeks to go before the wedding (really?!), Derrick and I find ourselves in conversations about what the future will look like more often than ever before. Most of it is just talk and daydreams and slivers of possibility. What happens next? When the dissertation is finished? When the next academic year is over? Where will we go? What will we do and be?
All this talk has had me thinking and rethinking about not only my own immediate world, but really the whole world. It's a big place, but not as big as I once thought.
Growing up in a small town, I only new one perspective. Small towns were safe, secure, quiet. Kids could run and play all day, ride their bikes down the middle of the street, play in any backyard they wanted. It was a most amazing way to spend a childhood. But with that perspective came a certain perspective of the "other" existence. Cities. As a kid, and even on my way to college as an 18-year-old, I truly believed that if small towns were heaven-like, cities must be hell. Danger, predators, noise, fences, stop lights, traffic...all of it was bad and scary and wrong. Similarly, when growing up within a 15-minute drive of all of the cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, I assumed that's just how the world worked. Everyone got together with their whole giant crazy family for every holiday, every Sunday lunch. And thus, as my logic would tell me, the "other", being away, was most certainly wrong.
But there was a strange contradiction building inside me. One that began to challenge these assumptions and perspectives. Something urging me to look beyond the confines of the known and just glimpse the "other." As an 18-year-old high school graduate, I excitedly embarked on a journey that took me, gasp, out of state. I crossed the Wisconsin border (all of 25 miles into the southwest corner of the state), and set up my new home in the big city of Platteville (pop. 8,500 or so). There were stoplights, a Wal-Mart, gas stations and grocery stores. And I was terrified. A brief adjustment period later, I found that I really loved that town...if only it were...bigger.
Bigger? But what about the evil of the city? What about that scary "other"? Some slow stretching of my boundaries was apparently redefining my perspective.
Fast forward to now. As Derrick and I set the table for dinner and cook side by side, our conversation once again meanders to the possibilities of the future. How do you feel about Canada? he says. There's a lot going on in Sweden, he suggests. Madison and Boulder are still just about the perfect cities, I think aloud.
At this point in my life, the world no longer feels like it's so big. Not quite as scary. There's less and less that seems so "other" to me now. If I adapted from a town of a few hundred people to a college town to a small city, surely I can adapt to wherever we go. There's still that contradiction inside me, that urging to go and do and try and learn. My family is so valuable to me, but maybe the experience of dwelling and growing up with all of the cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents just manifests itself differently when you don't live down the street from them. And maybe that's not so scary, just different.
As the world continues to shrink and my perspective continues to grow, I am more and more excited to take a leap. To experience the "other." To allow myself to truly believe that the "other" can be good. Maybe that little urge that's always been in me has really been preparing me my whole life for what is yet to come. It caused me to tiptoe out of state, then jump into a small city, then....? Well, who knows. But I sure will be excited to be there.
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