Bidding Farewell to Berlin

„Die Berliner sind unfreundlich und rücksichtslos, ruppig und rechthaberisch. Berlin ist abstoßend, laut, dreckig und grau, Baustellen und verstopfte Straßen, wo man geht und steht – aber mir tun alle Menschen leid, die nicht hier leben können!“                   —Anneliese Bödecker

“Berliners are unfriendly and inconsiderate, abrasive and bossy. Berlin is disgusting, loud, dirty and gray, with construction sites and congested roads wherever one goes—but I feel sorry for anyone who cannot live here!”

My time in Berlin comes to a close in a blur of exams and farewells and packing.

I structure my days around lasts: last meal with my host mom, last time on the Lankwitz campus, last time spent with the friends I have made here. These moments are a celebration of things I have come to care about here, the connections made, the struggles overcome.

Despite these celebrations, I am quite saddened at the reality of leaving this city. I spend my last few days in Berlin overwhelmed by all the lives I could have lived, all the things I could have seen or done or become. It is the universal, ever-pressing question: Who could I have become, if—?

If I had attended this or that event? If I had said no or yes or some answer in between? If I had sat with different people, made more friends, traveled more, traveled less? If I had overcome fear earlier on? If I had spent my days in this or that way? If I had opened my heart to more of the city and sooner?

There are a great many things I still wish to do and see here. While I acutely feel the finality of these last days and sense some sort of closure, I cannot shake the feeling that I am leaving things unfinished here. I am leaving before the height of the action, sneaking out the back door of the theater during a darkened intermission. Berlin: a smoky constancy of in media res.

Instead of rushing around the city, this drives me to the desire to cherish my moments more, to relish the moments of being here, now, at this stage in my life, given this passing glimpse of the goings on of history, in the context of such a rapid departure. For, in fact, the moments of beautiful pauses were what made my time here so special; these will be the moments that remain in my memory as I move on from this place.

My first weeks here were a struggle of adjustment and culture shock and time change. This is a different kind of adjustment. It is me realizing that the city will move on without me and I will move on without it. We are nothing but passersby in each other’s existences and I am not presumptuous enough to elevate myself to having left an earth-shattering impact. Berlin has impacted me far more than I will have impacted it. This is a moment of perfect truth to me: the sometimes-seeming indifference of the enormity of the world and her struggles does nothing to lessen her beauty or that of her inhabitants.

I do not want to leave Berlin, but leave I must. I am grateful for the months I have spent here and am indebted to all those who have let me share my time with them, who shared their time with me, and who supported me throughout my time here.

Why We Need to Practice Compassion for Ourselves

It is in the words we use, the words we tell ourselves, that shape our understanding of who we are and where we are meant to go. As such, I quite enjoy reading Danielle La Porte’s writing, which largely discusses love for self as a love that works to build a better world, starting with the self and extending outwards.

Her idea that fascinates me the most is the concept of practicing compassion: that showing compassion is not an at-once definitive act, but instead a practice and a process. This means showing extra forgiveness and extra love in the smaller moments, so that we can love harder and forgive better in the moments we want to the least, but need to show it the most.

I try to keep this concept tucked away in my heart, close enough to the surface that I can bring it into my life as needed and desired. I like to tell myself that this has somehow radically changed my life, and I add it to the list of life moments that challenged me to be more: the infusion of Laudato Si and Thomas Berry, the first words I fell in love with, the hospitality of the Franciscans, an understanding of interdependence from Judith Butler, the loving sarcasm of Anne Lamott. These are the moments that radically altered my worldview and have helped to shape my life and my sense of morality.

Despite this, I have spent the past few weeks in a state of constant failure of compassion: not towards others, I terribly hope, but towards myself.

I am prideful enough to believe that I attempt to be a good person. Yet, when I reflect on how I speak to myself, I do not speak in a way that I would towards any other person. I become endlessly judgmental, critical, and cruel. I do not allow mistakes or spaces for learning opportunities. I do not identify areas of improvement but areas of defeat. I collapse into little failures, each moment repeated proof of the insufficiency of my worth as well as my actions.

One of the hardest things to adjust to when coming to Berlin was the fact that I had no one to take care of. Back home, I have my family and friends and residents. I have a more clearly defined personal mission and am able to carry it out on a moderately regular basis. Here, I don’t. I encounter a radical independence that I love but can’t contribute to in the same ways I have before. I must find new avenues for compassion in the graffiti-filled streets of this beautiful city.

In this time, I realized the need to practice this compassion with myself, to look for the goodness in myself that I choose to see in others. I need to err towards a self-forgiveness that walks in step with self-growth and personal development.

I need to stop looking at the world as a race I need to win. I need to end comparisons of my beginning to another’s end, and acknowledge more soundly that we are all at different points in our respective processes. I must accept that I don’t need to have all problems figured out, all battles fought, all victories won or even strived for.

I need to treat myself the way I try to treat others.

I have heard that peace starts from the home and extends outward; so does love and compassion. Only through the process of struggling and finding this compassion for ourselves do we have any chance of extending that outward. It is in this space, in the lessons we learn from accepting ourselves, that can we position ourselves to show deeper love in a world so deserving of compassionate goodness.

How can you best practice showing yourself compassion?

Best,

Jenna

Building a Home in Berlin

Photo courtesy of sometimes friend, sometimes arch-nemesis Casey Molloy, who takes the pictures I pretend to be too cool to take. This is where the flee market was held.

At this point, I have been living in Berlin for slightly over a month. While I certainly had to adjust to living here, it actually did not take me that long to settle into a routine and adjust to the city in a practical sense.

However, for a while the adjustment I was struggling the most with was feeling deeply here.

Let me explain: of course, I continued to feel excitement for various activities, nervousness for new things, fear and sadness when both were due. Just like anywhere, some days seem more beautiful in the moment than other days seem, and on some days selective homesickness would set in more than others.

For the bulk of my first few weeks here, however, I did not truly feel anything. I lacked the ability, or the desire, to connect—to leave my soul in new places, or people, or experiences. I went through the routine of emotions as well as actions, which made feeling wonder and awe and all the things I need to write poetry that doesn’t remind me of my sappy and needlessly angst-y poems from middle school.

(I obviously don’t want to be reminded of my middle school self in Berlin, though the “anything-goes” attitude here may be willing to accept my previous propensity for wearing Hawaiian leis at all occasions.)

Middle school self thankfully aside, I knew that I needed a way to make a personal connection to Berlin. I was intimated by it, I think—by the size, the cold, the inherent, unapologetic coolness. It took a trip to Munich, actually, to change this. While a lovely weekend in its own right, I spent the train back to Berlin thinking about how much I would enjoy returning to my Berlin home, a bright apartment in a building with a heavy red door and a foyer with checkered black and white tiles.

That moment—this experience of coming home—has dramatically altered the way that I see the city and my place within it. I am now more willing and more able to find beauty here, and use those small moments to forge deeper connections.

There is beauty in Sunday morning strolls through the city accompanied only by the sound of church bells.

In recognizing the man who always plays the accordion on the S1 line.

In late night conversations that overlook the Spree.

In seeing a man in a restaurant that looked just like my Papa, and spending some time in the beautiful melancholy of missing.

In constant restaurant candlelight.

In thrift store Saturdays and new friends.

In the peace of drinking a cappuccino in the dark in a one-screen cinema in Neukölln.

In crowded night time flee markets.

In finding a café with candlelight and bookshelves, so warmed by loveliness you don’t need coffee to feel at home.

These are the moments I’ve come to hold onto: the moments that softly, slowly and without pretention, are building me a home here, too.

What are your moments building you?

Liebe Gruße,

Jenna

The Bountiful Struggles of Language Learning

Real talk: I am passably mediocre in a several languages.

My ten years of Spanish instruction left me with a constant desire to roll my r’s but an unshakeable insecurity about my knowledge of more varied communicative abilities. I can sing Latin feminine noun declensions to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” and can assert my constant desire to marry Brazilian sertanejo singer Lucas Lucco in Portuguese.

At present, my German is the best of any of these, which is fairly convenient and timely, given the whole being-in-Berlin-thing. I have studied German for the past few years, actively enjoy studying it, and have tried to practice as much as I can so far.

Despite this, language learning is—shockingly—very hard.

The combination of an inundation of new vocabulary, complicated sentence structures, and problems with proper pronunciation can sometimes make actually communicating in your target language seem like an impossible feat. These impossibilities become harder as you live in the environment you are trying to learn more about because, if you’re me, you tend to rationalize ordering a coffee from a café in the morning as sufficient language practice for the whole day, and instead spend your language learning time browsing through your almost only-English language Facebook feed.

However, gaining the courage to actually extend language learning outside of myself by venturing out into the city I love so much already is something that I still struggling with. Simple acts, like riding the bus or going through the checkout lane at a grocery store, fill me with more anxiety than they need to, as every potential interaction also carries within it the possibility of me saying something incorrectly or misunderstanding what someone else is saying.

In these moments of struggling, it can seem easy to shut down and cease all attempts at trying, resorting instead to the English that so many people here speak so well, the English with sounds that remind me of home. (For instance, I am currently not studying for my German test and am writing about it instead.)

However, in my typical annoying tendency of trying to be positive in moments of struggle, there is also a great deal of loveliness in the pursuit of greater language understanding.

To study a language that is not your native language requires training your mind and heart to seek meaning in new places, to hear beauty in the different sounds and smells and places that make up a place new to you and old to others. It means humbly reimagining yourself as a child, and accepting a lack of understanding of language and social norms. It demands that my perfectionist self let go of the desire to always be correct and in control. I must adjust to a worldview based on the idea of learning as a daily process of small successes and failures instead of an endless pursuit of perfection.

While I certainly aim on becoming better and more comfortable with German over the course of the next few months, I am happy—mostly—to be struggling with it.

Liebe Gruße,

Jenna

Orienting Myself to Berlin

It’s been a while since I’ve had my life shaken up properly. So often we become contented in our routines to the point of mindlessness. We forget the beauty that life contains and build up our immunity to the world like glass cages around ourselves. We become complacent with planners and daily rituals that shield us from the good things that they contain.

This is one of the beautiful things about culture shock, about unfolding your life in a place that is new to you and trying to figuring out how to stand there: it’s really challenging, at first. As I’ve begun to come to know and orientate myself to Berlin, even in little ways, even in the big and small lessons that this first week has taught me, I have both struggled and adjusted.

This week has seen me tripping on my excessive luggage, frozen to the inmost parts of my soul (pro tip: Berlin is cold), lost a little, acting like a tourist, avoiding acting like a tourist, coming to know a city with a complexly beautiful history of tragedy, fear, and progress, and working to develop new relationships in a place far from what I’ve known before.

Despite the differences, it is not too far from home. This is hardly a revolutionary statement, but people are people despite geographical, cultural, political, and all other so-called differences. Even in the midst of this past orientation week, a week of making mistakes and learning so much, a week of intense awareness of this perceived difference, some basic facets of life remain.

These moments of culture shock encompass the endless pursuit of life, I think: to struggle and adjust to each moment as you learn the ways to live in them more fully.

Finding Beauty in Airports: A Layover Story

 

Whilst in route to Berlin, I found myself in limbo-layover in the Newark airport. This limbo lasted for six and a half hours, and, as I am easily bored when required to stay in one general location for too long of a time, this was significantly less than ideal. To entertain my incredibly immature, five-year-old brain and attention span, I came up with a game for myself: to people watch until I found some sort of inspiration for a poem or story or personal journal entry.

I found nothing. Exactly at the moment, the universe decided that almost no one should walk by me, and the few that did appeared vastly uninteresting from a distance.

This made me antsier.

To pass the time, I decided to walk around with my obscenely over-packed carry-on and tried my best to not bump into every person that I passed: an endeavor that remains highly controversial, as the many victims of my deranged bag-carrying are currently emotionally recovering from my misdeeds.

It was here, however, that I began to see some of the beauty of airports.

One of the many beauties of airports is the way languages swirl around you as you walk, carried in the souls and vocal chords of people you have never met and may never meet.

I first thought of them as strangers, periphery people whose lives did not impact my own. It is quite strange, however, to refer to someone that we don’t know as a “stranger”—as someone who is “strange,” “foreign,” “other,” simply because you don’t know them. This seems unbelievably self-centered to me, a perspective that determines and assigns worth to someone else based solely upon our own perception of them and not on their own full and complex existence and inherent dignity, outside of the snippet we see of their lives.

This realization, however, is one of the reason I love cities, airports, and big crowds. It helps introvert Jenna better make sense of the world around her, which is something she needs, and often: that which emphasizes moving out of our own perspectives and into the beautiful conglomeration of beautiful good times, poignant bad times, and all the jigsaw pieces that put together a life and living.

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

Photo Credit: Flickr User redlegsfan21 (Creative Commons)

If there’s one thing that I’m tremendously bad at, it’s saying goodbye to people.

Before any major life change, I turn myself into what I consider to be an overemotional, generally silly person prone to bouts of sentimentality and grasping for hidden significance where there simply isn’t, or doesn’t have to be. This habit of pre-emptively mourning the temporary loss of life situations means that I spend the weeks prior to any strongly anticipated loss in a moody haze of heightened significance.

I look for lasts. I manufacture poignancy. I try to elevate each moment to truly wondrous heights. I foolishly believe that these past months, this beautiful semester, these laughter-filled weeks with my family, are the best that life will ever be.

While this strange, anticipatory grief is not always something that I appreciate at the time, it does allow me to find the moments that I will miss as we all progress to our next steps that this new year brings. For me, that will be the study abroad experience I’ve dreamed about for years. For some of my friends, that means moving onwards from Siena, something that has either happened in the past few weeks or will take place at the end of this academic year. For some, it will simply be the beautiful newness that little transitions hold, one year melting into the next with some elusive promise enclosed.

Despite the beautiful anticipation of this newness, I still cling to the memories that the past few months have brought me. I listen to the music that brought my friends and me through the essays and exams of finals week. I let my arms remember the phantom embraces of people I miss, friends I don’t know when or if I’ll see them again. My nose remembers the unique scent of coffee and pickles of my favorite coffee house in Albany, a city that saw me as a stranger until I came to call it my home for the first time in these last months. I feel the peace of sitting and singing with my friends on the last Wednesday of the semester, the whole of the semester coming to a close in that dark and holy space. I think of the smiles of game nights with my extended family, people I love and don’t get to spend nearly enough time with. I see the love and concern of my parents as we take each day as it comes, tackling the tasks of the day with laughter and a hint of stress.

I’m not good at saying goodbye, regardless of how exciting or fulfilling the future likely will be. I can’t help but look backward as often as I look forward. However, this duality allows me to carry the sweet past into the likely sweeter future.

Wishing you well in 2016,

Jenna

Don’t Be Afraid of Silence

Photo Credit: Flickr User thamimzy (Creative Commons)

There are not many times where silence is completely accepted in our society. We are people conditioned for constant movement and busy-work, for fast-paced progressions forward. While in certain situations this work is needed and vital, we also need to rest in the contemplative silence of reflection. This is not something many people tend to like, however.

Parents fear quiet car rides with their children, teachers dislike a silent lack of participation in their classrooms, and dinner hosts work to prevent the uncomfortable absence of conversation among their party guests.

Unsurprisingly, I think, I don’t mind silence. It is in this state that I choose to spend much of my time through a combination of still-lingering shyness and always-present, college-induced sleepiness. I like to settle into new spaces and new people and observe without impacting those things with my input until I have familiarized my words with the life of the place or the relationship.

As such, I suppose it makes sense that I love this time of the year, the week in-between festivities, when the hype of celebrating has, to a certain extent, died down. It is the comfortable silence after a meal shared in love, when everyone is too filled with food and happiness to be concerned with conversation.

It is the reflective space in which we remember what we care about and what matters in the busy times, where we can see the reality of what we find important.

It is here that I see the love of my family more clearly, the love that I sometimes cannot see as fully due to the cloudy nature of the daily immediacy of life.

It is here that I let myself feel the full reality of missing loved ones. In the busyness of celebrating, we may push aside the emotions that spring up during the holidays, the moments that remind us of the people we love that are not there anymore. We must embrace these memories, no matter how heart-breaking, that let us feel love beyond time-constraints.

It is here, the morning after a daily filled with hugs and love and well-wishing texts from friends far away that I can let the emotions behind those acts sink in further.

I am blessed–even, dare I say it, #blessed.

In this silence we can come to the full reality of who and what we care about and who cares about us.

The silence of the present is worth so much more than the stress and busyness off the Next Great Thing to Be Worried About. Embrace it.

On List-Making and Study Abroad

When I was 12, I made two important lists. The first was a list of possible subjects I could major in in college. While it included a great array of subjects, including such majors as Criminology, Whatever-Could-Get-Me-A-Job-With-The-FBI, and Art History, English was always at the top.

(This just serves to further prove the point that I have changed relatively little since middle school.)

The second was a list of places I wanted to travel to in my lifetime. It was written in pencil on wide-ruled loose leaf and took up both the front and the back of four separate sheets. I remember looking at the world map that hung on my wall and tracing my finger along the surface, charting possible road trips and flight routes, finding cities and towns on coasts and inlands with names I had to double check to spell correctly. I constructed this list thoughtfully and methodically, starting in the United States and extending southward, then beyond.

I found cities I’d never heard of before and cities I’d heard of extensively. My little knowledge of the world and its resources drew me to a world that existed only stories I’d read, stories I loved but couldn’t enter fully. On this map I located cities I’d read about in the novels of my middle school years. I dreamed of Oaxaca celebrating La Noche de Rábanos like in Esperanza Rising, of Athens, of the England that was hiding Camelot somewhere. I dreamed of Baghdad and her House of Wisdom before I knew the impact of the bombings. I collected countries like some collect book series or baseball cards, working my way around the world in a stationary search for meaning and answers.

As the study abroad experience that I’ve spent years dreaming of draws closer, I feel drawn to make another list of the places I want to visit whilst abroad. (Mostly because I really like making lists, especially on Post-It Notes). I’m trying quite hard to stop myself, however.

A few weeks ago, I read an article about being a traveler, not a tourist. In it, author Lauren Barth discussed the idea of being true to your own interests and intentions when traveling, which involves not traveling with a checklist of places to go and things to see. It means listening deeply to the sounds of the person wrapped up in your skin and letting your travels emerge from what you understand within.

In recent months, I’ve tended to prefer the Snapchat story version of life – the version that welcomes us into the life of a city or the intimate moments of a celebration, introducing us to people we will likely never come to meet. I’m biased towards good things, towards friendship and tender moments wrapped in laughter. These stories come to me in a language I understand, though my brain is not yet trained to hear meaning in the words themselves.

These are the stories that I am looking for during my travels abroad, but are not a checklist in and of themselves. Beyond this, I aim to keep my heart and weekends adaptable, fluid and changeable, open to experiences as they present themselves before me. By doing this, I hope to find the poetry of life in friends and companionship, wherever they may be found.

Why We Need to Challenge Ourselves to Plan Less

I like to challenge myself.

This means that I tend to be fairly critical of myself, for “challenge” inherently implies a lack of something and a consequential desire for improvement. I like pushing myself to do more and be more.

I like filled-up planners, back-to-back commitments, and late night coffee runs. I like feeling that I am doing something and that hopefully that “something” is important and worthwhile. I like looking back on the week and thinking about crossed-off “To Do” lists, plans established and put into motion, and activities attended.

I work to quell the loneliness that I feel sometimes, the loneliness that comes from growing up and out of yourself. I work to secure a future that I cannot quite grasp yet.

As a result, I sometimes cut the people and things that I love out of my life. I cut out writing until my fingertips cannot remember the sound of my soul whispering to them in the nighttime.  I let friends drift away, caught up in the minute of living and working. I no longer can fall asleep before 2 a.m., as my body has adjusted to a kind of sleep that is giving in to exhaustion at the last possible moment. I forget how to have interests outside of working and preparing for the end of the semester.

Because of this, I forget that the best parts of life happen when we are not planning for them. They exist outside the realm of schedules and list-making, in the spaces where life becomes incandescent with possibilities.

They are new laughs with old friends.

They are the conversations that build new friendships that we don’t anticipate.

They are spontaneous trips home.

They are the meditative solitude needed to reconnect ourselves to the way the world spins when we spend too much time consumed by our own minds.

They are the books we read for ourselves when we need something to believe in again.

They are the times we spend becoming informed about what matters to others and to ourselves and staying awake in the midst of them, for being informed is a basic form of caring.

These instances require that we put down our phones if we can, take a moment to collect ourselves, breathe and readjust to a world worth loving with intention.

They allow us to remove the barriers that we put between ourselves and what surrounds us—barriers of fear and insecurities, past worries and future anxieties, indifference and ignorance.

These moments remind me of what a sister at the convent I work at told me over the summer: that the most important thing we can give people is our attention. She said this with a smile in the busy half hour before dinner started, showing me that the miracles that touch your heart will sneak up and beg you to reflect in the midst of the busy immediacy of other tasks.

I think about these words almost every day. They require that I simply exist more often in the little, unplanned moments. They show me that the best thing I can do for you, dear world, is to keep my eyes open and my heart adaptable.

What are you not planning for?

With love,

Jenna