How I Learned Over Khmer New Year

Southwest Thailand.

Part of living in the Kingdom requires tumultuous ups and downs. Everyone does it. I seem to do it more than is necessary. Something about hot season makes thing the most difficult. 

Through my reading and my adventures, I started to reconnect with the idea of stories. I was a Lenten theme at my spiritual home. Our lives are stories. It's a cliche. Then I started to think about stories I've read or films I have seen recently...Les Miserables, Hunger Games, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, Mamma Mia (the later one I'm not proud of). These are stories. Granted fiction (both Hunger Games and Mamma Mia could possibly happen in an post-apocalyptic distopian world) but these are stories. And I realized, as Donald Miller so eloquently pointed out in a recent book, stories and films illustrate life and things we experience. 

My time in Cambodia has been an interesting mix of ups and downs. There have been many difficult situations that never made sense. No one ever wants hard times. None of the characters in the stories and films I've seen intentionally sought pain or suffering. Life is messy. And though crap happens, we learn and grow because of it. We don't grow as sedentary objects. If our heroes and protagonists never put the TV remote down and went outside, there would be no story. We wouldn't watch their stories or cheer them on. We grow in motion, under pressure, in the moments as unexpected as our drives home or a lunch conversation. So while I didn't ask for the hard things that happened, like my fictional characters, I can embrace the challenge with dignity...or I can be pathetic. 

While I have six very full months left in the Kingdom, I've already begun to grieve a little; for the city that I've come to call home, for the friends who have built my world from mundane into hilarious and food-filled. I grieve for the freedoms I experience here (freedoms which ironically many are denied). I've realized the importance to continuing to rise to the challenge in these final six months. It's easy to coast to the end in a blanket of pity, denial and misguided nostalgia. Or it's the opportunity to put down the TV remote and go outside every single day looking for adventure, right to the end.

Six months. Carpe Diem.