We were were sitting at the base of a crag eating apple slices, chatting with another pair of climbers about things like job interviews, health insurance, and courage. After they packed up to go, I mentioned that it was lack of bravery on my part that led me to say yes to my current job. It was not at all what I had imagined for myself after years of the sights and sounds of big cities, and the idea of going someplace so small was not as prestigious as what I’d thought working in Europe could be like. I wanted a better work-life balance, a society with social ideals, and a change of perspective, but I also thought I wanted a bit of glamour.
Fast forward a couple years: It turns out I love living here and am far more comfortable with my role in a small family-like school than I was in an environment with higher stakes all around. There’s a lot more to life than big names and big cities. And Weimar, as it turns out, is known for ideas and culture. It is also home to the people I’ve become close to, who are lovely indeed.
The question surprised me when it came because I hadn’t thought of it myself: Do you regret it?
No, not at all.
We finished the apples, reorganized the rope, and tied back in. Time to move on.
But I’ve been thinking about the question, and what I’ve found most interesting is not that it was asked, but that I hadn’t asked it. That’s not to say it’s been easy moving here, and being in a bigger city would have made certain things significantly easier at the beginning. My early blog posts about the move to Weimar only scratch the surface of everything I was holding inside at that time, and some old voice memos indicate that I’d been lying awake. But regret? Even when it was hard, there was no regret. I’d made a choice, and I’d made the choice for a reason, and that was the best I could do at that time. Perhaps it wasn’t the best reason and perhaps something else would have come along had I waited patiently, but I didn’t want to wait. I wanted the certainty of knowing. I had savings from years in Singapore, I saw a climbing hall when I looked at a map, and that was good enough.
Making choices means that we’ll never know what would have happened had we made a different choice. While I can smile at the question of what my life would have become had I, at 19 or 20, learned Italian and gone to Florence for a semester as I’d planned upon entering university, I don’t need to spend any more time thinking about it. I made a different choice and that was that. It was the best I could do at the time, and the only thing I can do going forward is remain aware of what has developed since. Just because I made a choice once doesn’t mean I have to make a similar choice in a similar situation in the future. Saying yes once because I didn’t want to wait doesn’t mean I have to say yes the next time.
Learning from an experience must not mean regretting having had the experience. Unfortunately, negative experiences are excellent teachers, and I find that we need those sometimes. When everything is easy, there’s little opportunity for reflection, and it is through reflection that we grow. I don’t see that as something to regret.
Do I regret moving here? Do I regret my impatience in wanting a job? Do I regret giving up the dreams of glamour and prestige?
No.
In the end, Weimar had a climbing hall and I’ve always been one to choose the café on the corner over the hot new spot. Maybe I know myself better than I thought.
Every so often there are moment that remind us of the groups we are fully, intrinsically, unquestionably part of . . . and the groups we are not. The groups where, for one reason or another, we stand a little bit on the outside. This is not necessarily a negative thing; we cannot be an invested member in all of our groups, simply because there’s not enough of us to go around. Furthermore, we might not want to be so deeply involved, perhaps because this would present us with obligations that we are not interested in or prepared to shoulder. It can be painfully difficult to come to terms with the groups that we want to be part of that do not want us, but that is not of interest in this post. Rather, this post is about recent circumstances in which group membership was unspoken but thrown into focus.
Language and Culture
Before I moved overseas, I helped out with the international student exchange program at my school. This opened my eyes to the question of integration: How do I help young people integrate into a group that is relatively homogeneous . . . and very different from what they are used to? This question changed in form when I had the opportunity to work in a very diverse environment in which integration was a question caught between language and culture. (Danau Tanu’s phenomenal Growing Up in Transit deserves mention here for its impact on the way I think about schools and language.)
In my somewhat nomadic adulthood, I find that language plays a more important role in my interactions and friendships than I would have guessed. For example, there is a difference in the shared understanding that I immediately sense with those who come from the same linguistic background as I do. I almost always know who is American (accents aside) based on the words that they choose in certain situations, or the way that they explain past experiences. Having worked with so many Brits, Canadians, Australians, and Kiwis over the years has tuned me into the differences in our cultural contexts, and therefore also informed the words that I use when talking to certain people. My favourite example here is “college”. This has a meaning in the US that does not match the meaning used by English speakers, and sharing the context is important. Telling a story about a high school experience needs a different explanation when I’m speaking with people who had a similar educational experience to mine. I am immediately “in” with those people, and forever “a little bit outside” of others.
A few weeks ago, my partner and I had dinner with friends and talk turned to just that – our school experiences. Not only did I have to ask clarification questions about what was clearly a shared understanding among the others, but I also had to provide background context before much of what I said could make sense. I laughed along with them as we talked, fully aware that the picture in my head of their world was likely as inaccurate as their picture of mine. The pleasure is in finding common ground despite the differences, and seeing my own experiences through new eyes.
Things like this happen so often. There are many instances in which my partner and I interpret actions or events differently, to say nothing of the differences in our language. Because I am the one who has moved, it is my responsibility to adapt to where I am rather than expecting to find what I chose to leave elsewhere. I find that I am sometimes caught unexpectedly unaware simply because I didn’t know that there could be another idea, interpretation, or action. I am simply “not from here” and haven’t run into this particular circumstance yet. A little bit outside, as it were.
I’m not sure when one begins to feel at home in a culture, though I have had years of experiences being surprised at what I found when I returned to North America. Sometimes I know how to live the way people in Germany live and I do it automatically, and sometimes it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror and forgetting that you got a haircut. It’s familiar but not quite right.
Social Groups
And now for a completely different example, one in which no one is talking about the groups that everyone knows are at the centre of the conversation.
In order to make plans for the summer holidays, I sent a message to a group of people who I had previously talked with about plans. The daily lives of these individuals are intertwined and I am the one clearly on the outside, a result of the choice made to live somewhere else. It is not a secret that this group interacts without me, that I fit in only at the seldom moments when I’m around. If I ever had different expectations, I lost them a long time ago. And I’m no more present for this group than they are for me; we interact infrequently, as has been the habit since before I knew it was a habit, and otherwise, it’s pretty silent.
For that reason, it didn’t entirely come as a surprise when my message went unanswered. I had anticipated precisely what I did not like, which is becoming a topic of conversation that I was not privy to. Being outside of this group means that I am not privy to very much, but it was obvious what was happening when I received no replies to a message that, among people who are part of each other’s lives, would have received replies. That the group responded (by not responding) en masse suggests that a discussion had occurred, a course of action deliberately taken.
This is a situation in which a group was clearly more than just one group, and being outside the group meant not being in the group at all. It’s interesting because this fact was always simmering under the surface and now it is fully out in the open, precisely by not being open. One of the things I learned when first working to integrate groups of students was that friendships thrive on shared experiences; it is difficult to feel connected to people when our shared experiences are few and far between, and especially when, looking back, what was ostensibly shared was only shared at the acquiescence of the group, and not those standing a little bit outside.
Reflections
Our daily lives are enmeshed in relationships, both those we’ve chosen and those we have been forced into, for a range of reasons. Building and maintaining relationships is a process with which we are all familiar, and it governs the way we structure our world. I love teaching the human relationships topic in psychology because it’s about the everyday experiences of all of us, immediately relatable and immediately captivating.
Maybe it’s because of teaching psychology that I am fascinated by the inner workings of my own relationships, and try to be conscious of the role I (and others) play in each of them. I think the important lesson here is that relationships are complex and there are more stories to explain them than the ones I can tell; just because I’ve interpreted a situation a certain way doesn’t mean someone else has. Humility plays an important role here, too. We must be humble enough to listen to other viewpoints, as well as confident enough to express when we disagree. We must be vulnerable enough to let others in, and strong enough to stand on our own. It’s a delicate balance, being human, and that is what we doubtless share, regardless of who is on the inside and who stands a little bit outside.
“Things I learned from Covid” was the title of a meme I saw online recently and, making light of the situation, it made me smile. It led me to consider what I learned during Covid, things that are well and truly part of my current life and times. There were a variety of things that I learned, as did we all, and I’ve written about my thoughts on online learning, interpersonal interaction, and how to move countries during a pandemic. I learned big things, we all did, but in keeping with the meme that I saw, I’ll keep this upbeat and practical.
French Braids
Part of the before-school routine when I was young was that my mum would do hair. One of us ate while the other brought my mum a comb, brush, and elastics, and then we switched. I remember asking for pigtails (which, having heard wrong as a little girl, I called “pink tails” until she took pity on me in my teens and corrected me) and braids, and sometimes “two pieces tied back”, which is exactly what it sounds like. A low ponytail I could manage myself, but I needed help with a high pony.
Throughout my childhood, French braids remained elusive. My mum couldn’t do them as swiftly as she could everything else, despite buying a nifty tool that was supposed to help you separate the strands and count them (or something). And of course, I loved French braids. My aunt did them for me when I visited and I’d sleep in them, enjoying the texture against my scalp. When I got older, friends did them at sleepovers or at the pool. Much later, I was always a little envious of people with beautiful braids, envious and impressed. French braids seemed impossible, and yet everyone had them. So they couldn’t be impossible.
During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time biking around Singapore, sometimes alone but also with friends when the regulations permitted it. And it was during this time, frustrated at the ponytail coming apart under my helmet, that I learned how to French braid my own hair. I learned just by trying what I had seen other people do countless times. Trying over and over – after all, I had the time.
For a while, I could only manage one braid, but I’ve since done as many as four. Two is usually my look of choice, though I admit that the ends look a little funny with my most recent short haircut. I’m fully aware that these braids aren’t beautiful – I have neither the hair nor the patience for that – but every time, I’m also fully aware of the circumstances under which I finally cracked this mystery. And it makes me smile, every day.
Bike Tricks
In keeping with the theme of spending a lot of time on my bike during the pandemic, it was then that I finally mastered the art of riding a bike with no hands. Having seen enough people (mostly kids and teenage boys) riding along casually hands free, some even texting while occasionally looking up (which I haven’t tried and won’t try), I decided it couldn’t be as hard as I thought it was. After all, I could French braid!
And like most mechanical things, I really just had to try. And try. And balance my weight properly. And ride a little faster. And keep my spine straight and abs engaged. And just ride. Without hands. And then one day I could do it and that was that. Sometimes, a little perseverance goes a long way.
Now I know that riding without hands is less of a trick and more of a means of stretching out the wrists and fingers on a longer ride, or to give the back a break. It is also much easier now that I have bike bags and never ride with a backpack. However, during my time in Singapore, it used to make the security guards at the gate laugh when they saw me. At a school where not many people rode to school, I cycled in wearing dresses and pencil skirts, enjoying the tiny decline after the tiny incline, hands in the air to wave hello. We needed something to laugh at then, too.
It’s easy to make light of what I learned during the pandemic, as easy now to laugh as it was necessary then. These are little things, and I find that it’s the little things that we can grasp and point to. I can’t tell you when I made my peace with the time I “lost” during the pandemic, but I can tell you that I learned to French braid my hair and ride my bike with no hands during this time. I can’t articulate when I accepted solitude rather than being frightened by it, but I can tell you that I find that centre again when putting my hair in braids or removing my hands from the handlebars to stretch. There was an era, a time, and then there is what remains from it.
So what did I learn from the pandemic? Plenty.
Singapore – May 2020
Photos, travels, musings, and ideas on education by someone trying to make the world a better and more peaceful place
By Rebecca Michelle 