im not too far from celebrating my two year anniversary of living in bermuda. as those close to me know, i have this habit of looking inwards and backwards at milestone dates. it keeps me honest. so here goes.
the last two years have been an exploration of who i am. parts of the exploration have been intentional and parts organic. its strange, because when i compare me now to me then, i don't know which version i like better.
when i moved to bermuda in september 2011 i was disinterested in work. i had just rejoined a firm that i had purposely quit only 6 months prior. i guess i saw the move as a chance to make a little money, have a little fun, and then move home. to this day i have no idea why i actually moved.
right after moving into my first place here, i remember sitting on the floor of my room one night. in a new country with no friends i realized i had a chance to rethink all my old habits. its a pretty freeing idea really. so i made one conscious decision - i'd read the whole bible over the course of the year. that would be a productive way to spend my newfound tonnage of time. in the months that followed i watched my faith grow as i plodded through the old testament. it provided me strength and happiness. then, at the peak of it all, i took a work trip home over easter in 2012, and its like a faith switch flipped off as soon as i returned back to bermuda. my regular trips to church stopped and my bible-in-a-year quest fizzled out. i still haven't found that same faith i had then.
after that easter, i replaced the time spent on faith with time spent with people. as anyone that has lived abroad will know, the expat community is a special one. its excessively active. because of that, i had no problem filling up every second of my time during the summer of 2012.
one of the people that took up my time that summer was a girl. she took me fun places, she liked to read, she was eager to ask and answer hard questions, she wasn't uber nice (i don't like em that way), and she is beautiful. she became my best friend. with her i had a summer that i won't ever forget. then around christmas time, in an all too unceremonious way it, whatever "it" was, died off.
the loss of my best friend during the autumn was unfortunately coupled with a newly challenging work environment. my old manager was made partner during the year, and the replacement was really ticking me off. i didn't feel like the expectations he set for me were realistic or grounded in any kind of solid reasoning. so i complained to a manager in the office. i complained to HR. i had a formal meeting to complain to the partner. that was the disinterested in work version of me i mentioned earlier coming out. the combo of work and friends made for a sucky end to 2012.
at that point something interesting started happening. i was working a lot and losing friends, but i was becoming very good at my job. not only that, i grew to revere the very manager that was driving me crazy. (it was a true case study in Tuckman's stages of group development) anyhow, i embraced my responsibility at work and made every effort to be good at what i did. people in the office started noticing. my contemporaries were coming to me with questions. i was holding conversations with people in ranks above me with relative ease. somehow i turned into a person that was driven at my job and eager to stay on and be promoted. talk about a contrast to September 2011 haynes.
skip to post busy season and i find myself in that promotion i grew to want. it feels like about 6 years of strange "coincidences" have led me to this job, and now i've arrived at the destination of all those bizarre twists and turns. the thing i've found is that my sense of direction is still no greater. i think i have a foggy idea where I'm going and i think i need this job to get there but the future is still completely unknown.
summer 2013 has come and gone. during the summer i've gotten just a wee smidge better than average at volleyball, i've had some pretty tidy rounds of golf, i've made new friends and lost another of my best friends to his new young family. overall it was a nice summer.
it would be nice if there was a tidy conclusion to this rambling. but as i see it, life right now is a set of open ends. i work a job that i didn't want just months ago, and i have no idea where its taking me. my faith still hasn't come full circle, but i can feel it returning. i have an open attitude to worship and there is a freshness in approaching it again after some time away. i don't really hang out with the two people here that used to get the majority of my attention. I'm grabbing around for best friends with no idea what'll happen. i really do hate how people can rotate out of life. it hurts. i'm still single. being single is not stressful, but it is definitely harder to get quality hang out time when all of your friends go home to a significant other. there are amazing girls out there, but the ones i know aren't in this country.
so after two years its been lots of motion. some of it has been progress, and its all been a learning progress. if anything I'm a little homesick and tired of change. i fully expect that this time two years from now ill be on my parents floor reflecting on the two years just gone by with fond memories. i guess its all just a journey anyway.
"send out your light and your truth. let them lead me."
No comments:
Post a Comment