Struggles.

You won’t be asked, by a vast creator full of light:

What did you do to be known?

You will be asked: Did you know it,

this place, this journey?

-Tara Sophia Mohr

I'm struggling.

Between the "I should do's" and the "I want to do's."  And between being and doing.

I've been here in Peace Corps Macedonia for nearly two years now. Despite a few project successes, I don't feel like I've done much. I've got this perverse drive to "do, do do!" 

I want my village of Novaci here to have a waste water treatment plant that uses innovative technology for maximum efficiency, maximum profit.  I feel like I should be the one to do it. Perhaps that would take care of the nasty sewer gas wafting from my kitchen sink every day. Other houses have it too. Is the sewer gas the reason I'm feeling so lethargic all the time?

I want my village of Novaci to have an efficient landfill and why shouldn't I be the one to do it? Now it's a sprawling blanket of trash and stink that makes my eyes water every time I have to drive by it to get to the mountains. The one where the only visible life is the skinny dogs and Roma (gypsy) people who scavage through the piles of decay.  

I am grateful for the Roma people. They recycle. They scour every trash can and illegal dumpsite they can find in search of plastic bottles. I've seen bags of bottles the size of grizzly bears tied to the tops of their rusty Yugo cars, or piled up on their horse-drawn cart. They even carry the big bags balanced on their backs and heads to the plastic recycling center on the outskirts of Bitola. 

There are many things I want to do for Novaci. I've been accumulating information and networking up a storm, but trying to pioneer a path through these environmental challenges at the local level, as an outsider, is draining. I feel like a fish trying to swim upstream in a river of molasses. I find myself so drained trying to swim against the current of the "I should do's" that I lack the energy necessary to ride the waves downstream on the "I want to do's."  

My Peace Corps service that was supposed to be about helping other people has unfolded into poignant self-discoveries. I know what I want to do with my time. I want to write a book. Not just one, but many. I have so many ideas. And the time to do it. But it seems selfish. Writing books here seems selfish. How will that help Novaci? How will that fulfill my Master's research for a topic related to International Administration?

The first goal of Peace Corps is to foster an exchange of skills (both ways) between Volunteer and Host Country.  While I swim upstream in my never-ending project to-do list, trying to impart my American "can-do" attitude on the people of Novaci, I struggle to accept the one skill that Macedonia (in all its forms - colleagues, friends, language, culture) has been trying to teach me since I arrived here. How to BE. Every day is a lesson in "being" - being present in the moment, enjoying coffee and laughter and comraderie at work; being present in the garden, enjoying coffee and laughter and relationships with my landlords after work; being present with friends, drinking coffee in Bitola, people-watching. Yet as we sit observing the life around us, I'm in my head day-dreaming of project planning, grant writing and doing work. 

I want to be in the moment, to be at peace with being more and doing less.  Yet I struggle with fear of failure, fear of missing out if I don't maximize the efficiency of my "doing" here. Even now, I sit at my desk at work, paralyzed amidst the warring of my "I shoulds" and "I wants" in my head.  Hence, this email. It was the only way to keep me from blankly staring at my email inbox, like a deer in headlights. My inbox bursts with emails related to waste water treatment, waste management and environmental grant opportunities. Yet if I open even one, I feel like I'll drown. 

So I write. I have no answers. I'm restless. Struggling. Contemplating. Writing is my way of being. It brings me to my own attention - to my thoughts, my fears, even my doings. Huh. Imagine that.

Lots of LOVE.

HT

PS. Here's a poem I've been contemplating the past few days. Food for thought.

In the End

In the end
you won’t be known
for the things you did,
or what you built,
or what you said.

You won’t even be known
for the love given
or the hearts saved,

because in the end you won’t be known.

You won’t be asked, by a vast creator full of light:
What did you do to be known?

You will be asked: Did you know it,
this place, this journey?

What there is to know can’t be written.
Something between the crispness of air
and the glint in her eye
and the texture of the orange peel.

What you’ll want a thousand years from now is this:
a memory that beats like a heart—
a travel memory, of what it was to walk here,
alive and warm and textured within.

Sweet brightness, aliveness, take-me-now-ness that is life.

You are here to pay attention. That is enough.

- by Tara Sophia Mohr, poem available HERE