Today I board a train for Luxembourg. Still to come is a video compiling my experiences in Spain. But what looms quite prominently in my mind, in spite of my reluctance to resign myself to its slippery powers of instigation of crisis, is the fact that now less than 100 days remain of my time in this country. More precisely, only 70 remain. While at the beginning of my journey, time seemed to be an ally, moving as slowly or quickly as I wanted, I now feel its finite quality. I am reminded of an hourglass, insistently and uncompromisingly marking every moment and never offering the gift of a redo.
So many checkpoints have been marked that once seemed as though they always would remain hovering on the horizon. We have made our class sejour to Paris. We have traveled to Spain. We have taken the SAT and now rapidly approach the season for AP exams. We have celebrated birthdays with host families that have become like blood, and we have graduated from meager communication of immediate needs to deeply contemplative exchanges about the merit of existentialism as a philosophical principle.
Knowing that I was coming to France stimulated a more deliberate pattern of living for me. Suddenly I was on a clock. With x days left in Atlanta, what did I want to do ? Who did I want to see ? What snack did I need to store up on for the plane ? My priorities shifted, being less oriented around the future and moreso concerning what elements of my daily life I would want to preserve some connection to. Every moment and interaction in the days before leaving presented a choice: was this something to grasp tightly or something that I needed to let go ?
Here in France I have been saddled with that same presence of mind. Each day has been about getting to know the people that welcomed me into their home. Every conversation with schoolmates solicited an attentiveness. Always highlighting all my experiences was the concept of time and capitalizing on the amount that I had. Who would I share the greatest number of laughs with? Who was just enough a reflection of the me landing in France that there would be compatibility, but also so different as to spark changes, to nudge me out of the mold I had learned to fit so cozily back home? I had a responsibility to make these choices every day, as I was actively steer myself towards something that I could not yet visualize. Most importantly was an aversion to stagnancy and sameness, a refusal to return home in the same state that I departed. That has meant taking risks greater than I would have ever dared in the city of my birth. Now, I have arrived in Luxembourg for a politics conference where we discussed prostitution in relation to sex trafficking from the perspective of legislation and business. This topic holds potentially a taboo in America, where prostitution is outlawed in every state besides Nevada. Since arriving I have learned the value of open-mindedness, as it means there always will be a space for acquisition of new knowledge. Understanding, to quote a speaker heard while here, promotes empathy which promotes unity.