Four years. What was the difference between being newborn and four? Twelve and sixteen? From freshly eighteen to mid-way through twenty one, (almost exactly, actually), it’s pretty enormous how much things have changed. As I am challenged to “Think May 8th,” the day after my graduation from Lewis & Clark, it is worth also reflecting on August 22nd, 2012–the day I flew to Portland from Chicago. I don’t remember the day, to be honest. I took a photo of myself the day before, but that is my only reference to those moments before the whirlwind began. Though I don’t remember the flight or anything, I know what it was like. I have flown at least a hundred times over the past four years, and almost always fly alone, making it a particular ritual in my life. Flying does mark starts and ends, but it also overlaps–each time I fly it is superimposed over another time I waited in the airport and found my seat next to the window. Not only in action, but in state of mind. I feel most reflective when I am on planes. Any mode of transportation, really, but especially airplanes. I’ve had countless hours to stare out the tiny windows and let my mind wander through the inhospitable cloudscapes. I like how these journeys mark transitions. They separate where I’ve been and where I’m going with a span of hours confined to a magic space tube with nothing but music from 2007 and my own thoughts. Then I step out and have completely traversed time and space, and it is strange when all I have to show for it is the lingering smell of stale air on my clothes. Flights have marked many of my most bloggable experiences, but they also bookend the many smaller, daily moments that are easy to forget.
Landmarks are the same way. Mt. Hood on a clear day, the spot on the bridge where I always slip, the overflowing lilac bush in my garden, and less concrete things like sensations or emotions. The world is always changing, but in the last four years it’s pretty spectacular how much seems to have changed. It’s a comfort to return to these landmarks and find that familiarity. Learning makes things complicated. It was always challenging to consider problems in the world and I how fit in, and learning intensifies that into a joyful, tangled burden. My course of study has only made this harder, and for that I am unspeakably grateful. It is hard to return home and realize that the world kept on spinning while I was away growing. This same emotion surfaces when I wander down memory lane and see the landmarks that felt so routine have a different air about them.
Both landmarks and airplane flights keep time in non-linear ways. They disrupt any sense you can have of a linear pace as you traverse time and space. Transformation to me means liminal space: middle-ground, in between, neither here nor there. It is an active process, while all around me it might seem to to “just happen”, it’s not that way at all. Transformation is the combined effect of everyone and everything in constant motion. I just notice it most when I have lost myself in my own daily life and open my eyes to find that the furniture is rearranged and people are standing on the ceiling.
I want to think about how I’ve changed over these past four years, how I’ve transformed. I find it’s really challenging because even though time is passing and the world is alive, I can still find myself in moments where I feel exactly the same, over and over again, and then other times, when I stand at the same exact window or walk the same path, I am struck by the realization that I see it, feel it, and think about it differently. It’s a truly profound feeling of entangled detachment, completely paradoxical and difficult to articulate. Especially because it is not just I who is changing. There is a whole bundle of emotions to deal with when the minute differences of every moment have added up to something with mass, something that you have no choice but to confront if you want to find a sense of normalcy again. You need to decide if you’re okay with that change. With transformation comes decisions, and with decisions comes a need to close some doors and trust in the future: that windows and doors and broken-down walls will open up a way ahead.