A nomad once more....
It was a year ago today; new city, new country, new school, new life. All a blur of lines and signatures, photos and blank stares. It was the beginning. Now it is the end.
I moved some odd couple thousand miles for a new experience - the chance to learn from a different system, be inspired by a fresh perspective. And, for a year, I've interspersed my experiences here with reflections from my past - or, at least the not so recent. Contrasts, maybe, of what it means to study architecture, or perhaps, a revelation of the things in common.
Maybe everything is circular. So many moments from this year brought me back to that first beginning, that first time I dove into architecture. The uncertainty, the frustration, the hesitation. I was myself, seven years ago, a freshman without a clue, a foreigner trying to fit in. Only, now, a bit more jaded.
The romance of education is in its idealism. You dream of the ways things should be, and feel that, in academia, the conditions are ripe for getting the perfect experience. But, like everything else, idealism must confront reality, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes it makes you fall deeper in love, and sometimes it breaks your heart. My first time around, I think it was the first. This time around, I'm not quite so sure.
The only constant of this romance is that it will, eventually, end. That you must move on. Moving on is a leap of faith. The threshold is one of amazing options - frightening for their possible consequences as they are exciting in their potential. I can't help but ask myself some of those existential questions - framing this moment as that pivotal point in which my life separates itself into a myriad of possible paths, each leading in far off into the distance, each never finding an intersection with another. Maybe it's overthinking it all. Maybe it is the absolute truth.
I'm leaving [on a jet plane], one week from now. One week from now, I'll be back, stateside, in search of a new, likely temporary, home. A nomad whose profession deals [most often] with the fixed, the permanent, the immovable. And, in a year from now, who knows? Maybe, i'll be at this same place, pondering where I next venture to.
I moved some odd couple thousand miles for a new experience - the chance to learn from a different system, be inspired by a fresh perspective. And, for a year, I've interspersed my experiences here with reflections from my past - or, at least the not so recent. Contrasts, maybe, of what it means to study architecture, or perhaps, a revelation of the things in common.
Maybe everything is circular. So many moments from this year brought me back to that first beginning, that first time I dove into architecture. The uncertainty, the frustration, the hesitation. I was myself, seven years ago, a freshman without a clue, a foreigner trying to fit in. Only, now, a bit more jaded.
The romance of education is in its idealism. You dream of the ways things should be, and feel that, in academia, the conditions are ripe for getting the perfect experience. But, like everything else, idealism must confront reality, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes it makes you fall deeper in love, and sometimes it breaks your heart. My first time around, I think it was the first. This time around, I'm not quite so sure.
The only constant of this romance is that it will, eventually, end. That you must move on. Moving on is a leap of faith. The threshold is one of amazing options - frightening for their possible consequences as they are exciting in their potential. I can't help but ask myself some of those existential questions - framing this moment as that pivotal point in which my life separates itself into a myriad of possible paths, each leading in far off into the distance, each never finding an intersection with another. Maybe it's overthinking it all. Maybe it is the absolute truth.
I'm leaving [on a jet plane], one week from now. One week from now, I'll be back, stateside, in search of a new, likely temporary, home. A nomad whose profession deals [most often] with the fixed, the permanent, the immovable. And, in a year from now, who knows? Maybe, i'll be at this same place, pondering where I next venture to.
posted by the silent observer at
6:13 AM
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