You find yourself coming up with the most interesting thoughts and analogies when you have so much time to think. For instance, I have connected the troop surge in Iraq to a strategy for using trash in your fire. You have to overwhelm the dung and wood with a shock and awe of flammable rubbish in order to make it count. Also, I have calculated the seconds remaining in my service (2,788,992,000 as of the time of writing this blog).
I have also figured out that I spent more of 2010 in Mongolia than out of it. That's amazing to me. I answer all of the time how long ago I came to Mongolia and when I came, but I guess I never thought of it in terms of having spent the majority of last year here. I still feel like my service is just beginning. Especially when I do things like calculate the remaining seconds.
With that thought in mind, I also wonder whether I am doing enough here. Whether I am making a difference or just pissing away tax payer money. It also makes me think of my mistakes I've made here and whether I have learned from the mistakes I have already made (today for instance I bludgeoned myself in the head with the sharp end of an axe while bagging coal, what did we learn?). But I've also made far more grave mistakes than gashing my head with the corner of an axe blade, and I wonder if I have learned my lesson.
In Dallas, I was a mentor for 7 10th grade boys who were considered possibly at risk. Maybe I wasn't much of a mentor considering 2 of them got expelled before the end of the year, but I told both of them the exact same thing the day after their expulsion. The only bad mistakes are mistakes that we don't learn from. And so looking back on a year of mistakes, I wonder what have I learned? And what have I learned since June 3, 2010? Maybe not as much as I should, but I'm trying. To quote the great Samuel L. Jackson, "I'm trying real hard, Ringo."
And so looking forward to 2011, I'm hoping, strangely, (and with minimal damage) for more mistakes, but different mistakes. If we grow because of our mistakes, do we grow without them?
1 comment:
That's really interesting to think about... I've had those thoughts too, but they've also been randomly followed by events that remind me that I've done something here, or changed somehow. Or something will happen that makes me stop and think that I would have that differently if I were still in the states as that other person. I guess time will tell for sure- we still have a year and a half. :)
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