Saturday Reflections

Saturday, Flight Home Reflections

We have the same flight crew for both legs of our journey.   Two of the flight attendants I chatted with just over a week ago are asking about our trip. A number have commented on how fab our boys are behaving on the plane.  I’ve been wandering up and down the aisles watching them find goodness in the situation, being in close proximity with little opportunities for movement or anything other than quiet entertainment. The seats are comfortable, liquids are regularly distributed, the sound system and reading lights for the majority of the seats don’t work but boys are coping because they know they can. They’ve been exposed and immersed in so much rich history, architecture, customs and traditions. Far from home they’ve discovered things about the world outside of their own and also about themselves. They’ve practiced and refined dealing with unexpected “situations” over the course of the past eight days and have found that they can and will deal with what life offers. 

I noticed that the desk light did not work in the hotel room when we checked in on Friday, a much-needed device that enhances my ability to see what I am blogging. It took three phones calls to the front desk to get five hotel employees to take four trips to my room to make the desk light functional.  They came, first individually, then in a triple batch with tools, and finally, even after light had been restored, another showed up with a bag of chocolate bars and a screwdriver (?). I watched her watch the light turn on and off, off and on, clearly functioning and yet she remained with chocolate and her tool. She remained in the room until I gave her what I hoped was a universal sign of functionality-a big thumbs up. The situation needed to run its course and I was one part of a larger machine.

The trip was sometimes like that.  Things weren’t always as expected (but frequently also were because of detailed planning and the perfect balance, I hope, between nurturing, nagging and the serendipity of connecting with people that you know on one level and then, through proximity and opportunity, discover in a new way.) Life, and our trip, unfolded in remarkable, edifying, thrilling and unexpected ways.  Things happened that didn’t always seem to make sense but most frequently goodness prevailed because we willed it to be so. We became the vehicles of opportunity and goodness. Most of us resist change. We create pictures of how things need to be and mesh the pics with the stories we tell ourselves in hopes of creating a stable reality.  The best planning, organizing, and communicating can only take us so far, both on the trip and in life.  It is relatively easy for most of us to shine in the best of circumstances.  How we react and sustain ourselves in the face of the challenges that life always provides defines who we are and who we continue to become.

     As I typed the boy’s final reflections for the blog, late last night and early this morning, I was struck by their willingness to find opportunity in the situations and circumstances they experienced.  We look back on fond moments on the trip; the sweetness of boys singing a well-known Chinese folk song on the bus with Howard, our Xi’an tour guide, faces flushed with excitement amid thousands of terra-cotta foot soldiers, the frosty mountain air after learning about, scaling and descending the Great Wall, the thrill of so many choices at breakfast and the sweet goodness of being with people who know you and like you because of and in spite of it all.  There were so many moments of kindness, generosity, and selflessness.  There were little chats about choices and times to examine decisions made and their effects.  We went to the same places but had different take-aways…as in life.

The 2012 China Trip was not a vacation. It was a cultural opportunity, a personal and group journey. In the end, as in life, we get what we get from it and part of what we get is dependent on what we invest.  Some boys wrote about how this trip opened their worlds, helped them expand their willingness to experience the new, to experience responsibility without burden, to see the world with fresh and open eyes. The best of trips make you a better person, because things go so well and because they don’t.  In the end it all seems magical and exciting and worthy of reflection and wonder. Because, if you are lucky or willing, goodness, opportunity and growth are always around the corner, even in another corner of the world.
-h2