Life changes ahead

I’m going to give notice to my boss and my company on Tuesday.  As if this decision is not really real enough, it is about to become significantly more real this week.  Hmmm, this is looking like a philosophical posting – readers beware.

In life each person has the choice to:
  1. pretend there is no personal control, changes are all fated.
  2. try to stay the same and not change, 
  3. try to take complete control of the changes, or 
  4. make peace that our lives change by a combination of personal choice and outside forces.  


I never remember believing in the first choice.  I was naive enough to live for a time as if the second one was true.  I still MAINLY act as if the third one is true despite overwhelming evidence over last few years.  One might think that recent events would have already been proof enough that this is not possible – but I've got a hard head and a stubborn streak.  I think that going into the Peace Corps will reinforce the fallacies inherent in the first three and finally allow me to embrace and follow the fourth choice.

We all change.  This point was brought into better clarity with a friend's comment that I was now a “tree hugging hippy”.  First the background:  I love socks and shoes – I live in socks and shoes.  Except for the beach and swimming pool I've NEVER been comfortable in sandals.  I'm the only one in my family growing up to have this preference.  I had many arguments with my brothers and sister who insisted on going the sandal or barefoot route.  They, with my parents, have been firmly in the Birkenstock camp for years, decades.

Now I've been told that Ghana will be too hot for socks and shoes all the time so I bought a pair of Birkenstocks and thus the hippy comment.

Currently, I’m trying to get the sandals and my feet on friendly terms.  So far the sandals are not playing nice.  There is still time to work out the relationship and no one said that change would be easy.

The comment got me thinking about the tree hugging hippy idea on two other levels.  First, although I have been on the bandwagon for environment stewardship for a long time that comes from a scientific belief and a rational conclusion that severely harming a closed ecosystem beyond its carrying capacity is STUPID for those thinking about future generations.  So tree huger maybe...

However, I've never been what one would call a hippy.  I've always been waaaaay to self-controlling to be classified as a free spirit.  Heck, I looked up hippy to see what characteristics I shared with the Wikipedia entry.  Let's just leave that as enough said.

Second, some people my presume that being a hippy is required for the Peace Corps.  I’m not expecting that to be the case.  Reading blogs and Facebook entries shows this to be true.  Certainly, most people join with the desire to help people - but that desire is not limited to one of the many artificial categories of liberal, conservative, religious, secular, this, that, and something else.  The volunteers will all be different, all have things in common and things that get on each other’s nerve from time to time.


I do think that the service will help me better understand that my limits are no so limiting and highlight further things that need to change.  Some of my next steps may be more painful than recent steps spent breaking in sandals.  However, sometimes we need to feel a little pain to change the way we walk, talk, think, and act.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yam harvesting

Image
Roger and I went to farm to harvest yam on Saturday morning, September 13, 2014.  In Ghana a yam is a root crop that is different from a sweet potato.  We have sweet potatoes here as well. Yam recently harvested Preparing a yam for boiling The yam has a white flesh – softer than a white potato. In this area the yams are planted between April and June.  Harvest continues into December and January depending on the weather and pigs getting into the field. The plant is a vine – which is grown on stakes rather than allowed the spread out.  The plants are placed on a raised bed about 2 feet high.  The beds are surrounded by flat trenches.  This allows the rains to flow around, but not wipe out the yam crop.  Intercropping seems to be common practice with yams planted in the raised bed, soybeans around the edges, and rice in the trenches.  The occasional corn or okra plant is also among the yams – although the bulk of those crop...
Read more

Pito – brewed millet

Image
Corn, rice, and millet are the common grains grown in my region of Ghana. All three are used food, but millet is also used to produce the local brew – pito, or daa in the local language. “N nyu daa” - in Dagaree means “I drink pito.” There are several varieties of millet grown here – a red and white varieties have loose heads. These are used for pito and other foods. There is also a smaller seed variety with a tight head of seeds that is mainly used for porridge. (Don't have a picture of that variety yet.) In all varieties millet grows on a stalk with the grain head at the top of the stalk. White and red millet in the field Two bundles of while millet to be used for seed next season Converting a grain to alcohol is a common practice in various cultures. It provides a way to capture and digest the nutritional value of the grain. In some places, like Germany and the beer brewing monks, the making a beer was a way to preserve the harvest. In Ghana the millet is ...
Read more

Ghana Archery and Travel to Tamale

Image
Ghana Archery Roger and I were walking to see a man in the community early last week and he happened across an arrow head. It was a long thin metal piece that would be attached to then end of a shaft. That got Roger talking about archery and got me thinking about another blog post. He explained how the arrow worked while we walked and promised to show me a bow and arrow when we got back to his house. He talked about the old times when they made poison. The process involved collecting plants and such things and placing them in a pot which is buried for a year. The poison was used on animals and people in the ancient times. That got me thinking about the information that has been and is being lost in the community from the older generation. Yesterday, I was sitting talking with some of the older men and they were talking about how the grandfathers could dig up the roots and such to make medicine for a variety of illnesses. They told me that the knowledge and practice of m...
Read more