Earth Quakes and Tremors: The Passage of Time

When I returned from Peace Corps I started playing the “One week ago today game.” This game would consist of me marveling over how different my life was from the week prior. The first time I played it was the Friday after Thanksgiving 2007 three days after I arrived back in the states. On that day I went shopping with my friend Marie in San Francisco, changed in the store into a new pair of jeans, a stylish pink top and black trench coat and went with some funny, witty, urbane new friends out to Vietnamese food and a martini bar afterwards. The week prior to that I had been saying my good-byes to my students in a school with no running water and intermittent electricity and burning garbage in the back yard of my soviet block apartment next to a dead goat hanging from a laundry line.

After that I briefly played the “One month ago today game” but settled on the “One year ago today game.” It was a pretty fun game for a while. The stark contrasts just kept on coming. One night last October, I was wearing a formal gown driving in a taxi passed the White House leaving a statistics review session and on my way to a black tie energy awards dinner. I tried to remember what I had been doing one-year prior, probably sitting by the pond in my village watching the geese fly or cutting up Peace Corps manuals to make flash cards for my students. I played this game countless times, often with Peace Corps friends who also had the Grand Canyon between their life then and their life now.

A few weeks ago I went back and read every post I have ever made on this blog. I began posting in July of 2005, just before I left for the Peace Corps. So many things have changed in my life. But today I am reflecting on the things that have not changed, or sometimes the stories that bend back over on themselves with out the players even realizing. Today I relived a very familiar scene on the front step of my apartment building, something which happened with a very different person almost exactly one year ago today. As we swim through the Christmas season and on toward the New Year I would like to think that the circumstances of my life have changed. But I understand that I am looking at the wrong thing, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about the actions of others, about the way they choose to regard me in their lives. And I understand that this description is fairly oblique and lacking in all of the colorful detail I so like to provide my readers, but it hasn’t exactly formed a shape in my mind either. Maybe my lesson for the day is that not every single thing can be described and nailed down for all eternity on a previously blank page.

I suppose it isn’t reasonable to win the World Series of Change every year. I think, and I have observed this phenomenon in others, that I am in some ways addicted to change, to contrast, to challenge and conflict. This habit is hard to kick, contentment is some how uneasy for me because I have lived my life seeking and striving for an unnamed finish line because the thrill of the new and the hard won victory are my drug of choice. But when I observe what has happened over the last several years I see that a lot has truly changed. When I play even the “One month ago today game” I see that things are different, that I know more about the world and about myself then I did just thirty days ago but the tempered Obama incrementalism of my daily life just doesn’t feel like enough against the emotional craving the electorate has for change, for the swift delivery of the hope promised. But intellectually I know that it isn’t reasonable to feel the earth move under my flip-flops on a daily basis, the tectonic plates creep ever so slowly toward a future configuration. Some days we can feel them, some days it’s a problem, some days a disaster, scientists can even measure these things, but they can only guess when “The Big One” will hit.