I'm in Wisconsin on vacation and it's ... what day is it again? Saturday the 25th. Right. I'm leaving for Lyon, France in 3 days. I have to survive a whole semester of classes taught in French. Whew! Can I do it?
You may be thinking that Wisconsin is an unlikely vacation spot, and this thought often plagues me on the 13-hour drive to visit family. I sometimes wonder, in the car, if I actually like them that much. But I do.
Interesting things always happen here. My family is full of people who are a great deal more intriguing than I am. Heck, I have a cousin whose New Year's resolution for 2006 was not to ride in a car the entire year and to get around by bicycle instead. Including the winter. In Wisconsin. And he did it.
In any case, my time here is a little R and R ... and R (rest, relaxation and reflection) before my trip. It's giving me a little downtime to mentally digest where I'm going with this whole study abroad thing.
Every time we come to Wisconsin, we rehash some old issues. What got us to where we are now? What happened way back then? How do we feel about it? I would say that most of us are pretty satisfied with our current lives, so it's not that we're ruing the situation. And it's not all we discuss -- these issues seem to come up once or twice per visit. Our visits are just frequent enough that they provide a suitable time to reflect upon some chapter of the family saga.
Within the context of any of these conversations, I try to figure out how I fit in. I want to see how my life has been shaped by the process, which can be quite a challenge in the stories where I don't yet exist. But even those distant aftershocks have probably affected my life in some way, however indirectly.
That's where my thoughts about France come in. Will this semester in Europe figure prominently in shaping my life story? Will it be a story I consider worthy of relating to my future children, once they get old enough to see beyond their own self-centered existences and ask? I figure this is only going to happen if events over there have a real impact on the rest of my life. Which events will take on significance? And will I assign meaning to the events after the fact? That's usually the way it goes. Only the rarest and most dramatic of events seem to proclaim all on their own that they are meaningful.
Basically, I think it comes down to whether I will choose to make my journey meaningful, because I highly doubt that the action itself is going to deign to choose me. I'm neither pretty enough nor brazen enough to attract that sort of drama. So, if I go in knowing that it's up to me to make this trip something important, how will such a mindset affect the opportunities I choose to pursue? In that same vein, to what extent does this consideration (or lack thereof) affect all of our decisions? Would our lives be different if we considered our role in fate more often? Would it change things for better or worse?
I can't predict the future, but it's possible that I will turn out to be one of those crazy, mad-as-a-hatter grandmas who wears hideous muumuus and gaudy lipstick. I'll sit my pained grand-kiddies down in my lap -- when they're much too old for it, of course -- and begin most of my stories in a shaky, warbling voice: "Back in '07, when I was in France ..." Heck, you never know for sure.
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