Poco a Poco

It's been almost nine months since I first arrived in Panama. In less than nine months, I went through the highs, lows, and everything in between while living in Shanghai, and then I moved home. Here however, I've gone through the same motions and haven't even hit the halfway mark. I've also been presented with a much more raw living situation in which I cannot run away from my troubles and instead must face them head on. A somewhat comparable situation as expressed by Cheryl Strayed in the book Wild...

 The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

To generalize my situation a bit, I challenged myself at every turn... I had just finished school with an amazing final year, lived abroad in China and started an English language group there, why couldn't I achieve here and now as well?

Over the months I continued to challenge myself and snowball my thoughts into greater and greater frustrations. I compared myself to other volunteers and found faults in myself, looked at where I should be, and realized I'd fallen quite short. I blamed myself, became frustrated, angered, I felt a whole wave of disappointing emotions about myself.

Out of all boo-hooing however, I began to shift my perspective and look inside and I started to realize something... Well, a few things. The first being that I am not other volunteers, my community is not their community. As I progressed from here, I continued to have more realizations about my situation. Most importantly of which is that so long as you're moving forward, you're moving forward. If you fail, get up try again. You've traveled a path to failure but you have eliminated that path and you're one step closer to success. If you pause, pause for good reason. And if you're moving ahead, even at a slow pace, it is progress. As I've started to say in my day to day living and doing, "Poco a Poco", or "little by little".

Keep on in the direction of success and sooner or later, through all the downs and depressions, you'll find you're way there.