Arriving


“I haven’t really had to cry yet since I moved, and I know that doesn’t sound like much, but—”

But it feels a little like victory.

I heard someone say this recently, and I couldn’t have agreed more. Arriving in new places, new jobs, and meeting new people has taught me to expect the sort of struggle that leaves me crying at the smallest of problems. When I moved to Korea, a dog barking at me could make me cry. Even that homeless dog knows I don’t belong here!

For me, finding the paths I need is the most crucial part to feeling like I belong in a new place. How to get to the grocery—oh. It’s closed? Where’s the next nearest grocery? That’s closed to?!—how to get from the parking lot to my office to the nearest bathroom—no, not that bathroom; it has a cockroach living in it—and where to find a reliable source of ice cream and cookies.

I’ve been in my new home of North Carolina for two weeks now, but I kept waiting to write this blog. It doesn’t count, I kept saying, until . . .

Until what? What would make my arrival in North Carolina “count”?

Last night the answer hit me: getting massively lost or finding myself helpless and then breaking down into the consequent helpless tears. Then I would have something terrible to write about, an enemy to overcome, and a victory to claim once I’d managed it. Stories need an enemy. “The media are the enemy of the people” is, after all, a far more satisfying story than “The media have to pander to audiences and that causes some problems.”

Unfortunately for my own dramatic narrative, I have found no enemies here in North Carolina. The aforementioned grocery closures and a friendly bathroom cockroach have been the only “enemies” I’ve encountered. (Also humidity. But we are enemies of old.)

This is the trap of narrative: the downside to the drama we ask of the world. Expectations of stress and hardship evolve into a belief that our experiences don’t “count” or they aren’t real without suffering. I’ve seen this in the church all too often: I’m not a “real” Christian because I haven’t suffered the way Christ suffered. I see it in graduate school too: the identity of graduate students is tied to suffering—study and teaching, reading for endless hours.

Why do we look for an enemy? Why do we need one in order to feel validated in the paths we ourselves are choosing?

I hope to counter that narrative. I hope to believe in a God that strews goodness across my path not as any kind of reward, but because God loves good and beautiful things. Suffering happens. Transitions are tough. “Enemies” exist. But our narratives give them a lot more power than they should ever have.

I think a quote from the estimable podcast Welcome to Nightvale is appropriate for an ending to this “arrival”:

The past is gone and cannot harm you any more.
The future if fast coming for you,
but it always flinches first
and settles in as the gentle present.

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