You Don't Know Jack

Or Ammar. Or David. Or Lelia. Or Aqmad. Or Shema. Or that one name that I didn't quite catch because of that thick accent.

After one week here in Israel-Palestine - after a week of incredible, life-altering, paradigm smashing experiences - I am left feeling more hopelessly incompetent that I ever have before because I learned that just as soon as you think you know something, you realize: You Don't Know Jack! The world is infinitely more complex than I will ever be able to comprehend. To say that I have pinned it down is just arrogance. Nothing is EVER as simple as I could make it out to be.

For as long as I've known about the conflict, I have tried to avoid drawing conclusions. I don't like to make decisions in general, but I've always felt that I simply don't know enough about the conflict to ever give judgments of the "rightness" or "wrongness" of this or that side. I simply should not be allowed to ever make that call. However, as I started learning more, I began to subconsciously adopt the rather snobbish-intellectual perspective: Occupation is wrong, and those who suffer as the occupied people must always be right.

Now, let me be absolutely clear: I am certainly not going to turn my former opinions on their head. I have seen some of the evils of occupation firsthand. I have seen how it puts any sort of equal playing field out of the question, how it dismantles the economy, how it can keep people from living normal, self-determining lives. I cannot forget these things, and I do not think that they are right.

However, now I'm at an Israeli settlement. I am staying with an Orthodox Jewish family who is actually living on one of those supposedly illegal structures built on Palestinian land - one of those structures that I've probably lambasted in the past. And I've come to realize that just as soon as you think you know what you're talking about, you should probably shut up really quickly, because you absolutely do not know the whole story. Today, I've heard stories of people who want the same things that we all want: they want a place where they can practice their religion in safety, where they can teach their children good values, pass their traditions on to the next generation, have a place to call home and a community that they can share the triumphs and tragedies of life with others. Now who the heck am I to condemn anyone for pursuing these beautiful things?

I am not saying that I agree with every action taken by the Israeli government or even its citizens, and I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some concessions made for peace. What I am saying is that I was far too quick to point fingers previously. I don't know all the sides of the story or all these rich and wonderful personal narratives. I feel absolutely humbled by all the stories of fear and longing and desire that I've heard - I wish I had time to go into detail to them here. What I can say now with even more emphasis than I ever have in my life is that to every side of a conflict there is a story. Conflicts are comprised of people having individual struggles; to take the human out of the picture through demonization or stereotyping or simplifying is to absolutely miss the point.

I feel so blessed to have such a beautifully challenging experience. If only I had time to write more! Someone said today: You stay in a country a week, you could write a book. For a few months, you could write an article. For a few years, you wouldn't be able write anything at all. This is a little bit how I feel. I think that if I stayed here forever, I just would not even know what to think anymore. The more you continue to learn, the more you realize ... you don't know Jack.

Thanks for taking the time to read up on my experiences! I look forward to sharing more!

Seconds and Snowflakes

I know I shouldn't be here right now. I know I still have an empty backpack, and a mind and body devoid of REMs. But the house is still, and my mind is not, and it just seems like it would be a good time to write.

It feels strange to hear the click of the keyboard as something almost comforting - especially when it mingles with the sound of the birds who have taken in upon themselves to gently stir the sun from its slumber. For the past four years, the seconds that wedged themselves between the click of the keys in the early morning were torturous to me - they were lost seconds, and every one of them would bring me nearer to a deadline which kept coming toward me at a faster and faster pace. Now, however, the words that accompany the sound of the keyboard can come as they please, unforced, and the seconds that occur between sentences don't have to taunt me.

The seconds that make up my life - whether they occurred in between the clicks of the keyboard or between the steps I took as I walked from one campus building to the next - accumulated without my realization, like a light snow that somehow turns the world white in the morning. Now it's like I'm awakening after that silent snowfall, wondering how the landscape of my life was so profoundly altered by just those tiny, insignificant seconds; there is both a sense of peacefulness and foreignness to this new world, and I'm walking out into that dazzling whiteness, just trying to adjust my eyes.

The landscape will change for me yet again, albeit briefly. In just a few hours I will have to be ready to leave for Israel-Palestine, perfectly loaded backpack or not. This trip came up suddenly. For months I told myself that it would feel more real when it got closer, that I could focus on it more once things like school and work weren't obstructing my vision. But finals week came and went before I could even see straight, and now ... now it's all over. Everything that I've worked for over the past four years has been accomplished. Soon I will come back and pack up my room and leave this house and the people in it, and I don't know when I'll see them again. And right in the midst of all this, I'm leaving. And there's a large part of me, at least right now, that would give anything to just push this trip back one more week, just one more week to let me make my peace with where I am right now. One more week to relish in the highs of graduation, the excitement of the year that lies ahead, and the blessings of living with your friends. It's ironic that I'm setting out with the intent of greater comprehension of a enormously complex political struggle - and all I want is to be able to comprehend what's happening at the micro-level of my own mind, my own life.

I think the past two days have finally caught up with me. My attempts at packing tonight brought me to my emotional capacity, and everything bubbling beneath the surface just exploded in unrecognizable forms - the sadness of the reality of leaving my family and Matthew, the ache of finally saying one goodbye after another to friends, the frustration of not having everything "in line" the way I would like it to before I leave, the disappointment that the roommates couldn't have the quality farewell that I had hoped for. I have realized again and again how hard it will be for me to finally leave this place that I have come to love so deeply, and all the experiences that I have had here.

I'm not going to lie, I'm sick of this house. I hate this drafty living room, but when I think about all the life that has occurred here, it makes me sick to leave: late-night study parties, finer films, birthday surprises, the countless episodes of Seinfeld and endless bowls of chips and salsa ... All of this is over. I feel a lot like I always did at the end of camp: there's a time when it hurts so much to know that something you love so much is over that you feel a little numb inside - numb, but still raw.

I think what is keeping me going right now is this passage from Donald Miller's Through Painted Deserts. It's a decent enough read, but the foreword is the part that really captivated me when I read the book a number of years ago. These passages are ones that I turn to often when I can't keep up with all the cycles of life. I'm including a big chunk of the foreward here, but if you have a moment, I'd encourage you to read it. I think they're some of my favorite written words, which is saying something for an English major. :)

"...Every person has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

...Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath ... It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed."

The page count is dwindling for me for this part of my life, and soon I will shut the cover altogether. I guess I just have to keep reminding myself that there are more books to write.

Thanks for reading.