Mcnair Travel Stories Submission - Doubts And Redemption

Doubts and Redemption on Striking Out Abroad Two weeks ago, waiting interminably for a job, I decided to go out on a limb and move to Berlin. You know. Just leave. You might call it an impulsive decision, and I understood this at the time but I did not care. I was done with waiting at home, done with spending half my day on the Internet e-mailing heads of hiring, following leads and researching new possibilities. I was losing my ability to endlessly assure these potential employers of my excitement about, knowledge of, and suitability for their companies, all of which advantages I unfortunately lacked. I was especially tired of doing so in such carefully professional prose, which sort of thinking doesn’t come naturally to me (or, I suspect, to most kids of this generation). My thankfulness for my potential employers’ time and energy, which I often felt obliged to assure them of, was worn thin. And—most significantly, the big kicker —I was 22 years old. I had just graduated from college, and sought adventure with all the fervor of youth newly freed from responsibility. So on one quiet Tuesday I went online and found a plane ticket from JFK to Berlin-Tegel International for a pittance; debated for a suitably serious length of time, about ten minutes; and then clicked that final “Confirm Purchase” button. Departure set for T-9 days. I whipped up excited text messages to all my friends (the folks would get the news later, of course, after I had carefully drafted a convincing presentation) and I made a gloriously concise list of the things I would need to pack. I set about burning all my bridges at home: I killed my US cell phone plan, terminated magazine subscriptions, and told Facebook that I no longer knew my personal contact information for the near future. I mailed my cherished $40 Ben and Jerry’s gift card to a friend in North Carolina. I packed. I wrote all the thank-you notes that still needed to be written, and saw all the friends I needed to see. At times I was ridiculously excited, but I was also surprisingly doubtful. This was not one of those times where you feel you’re finally taking a path laid with iron rails, whereon your soul was grooved to run, as it were. I had trouble explaining to others and to myself exactly why I was going. I was criminally doubting throughout the whole process, changing my mind back and forth—should I cancel my ticket? only 60 bucks to cancel—on an hourly basis. I didn’t have a place to stay, didn’t have a job or source of income, had poor relations with my few contacts in Berlin, and I hadn’t spent more than six months of my life even speaking German. How could I get a job there? I wasn’t even sure Berlin was the place I wanted to go; with so many wonderful and strange places in the world, how could I justify myself as a bold and brave adventurer by moving to some upscale city in Western Europe where half of the advertisements are in English because it’s “cool”? Half of Germany speaks English anyway; they don’t need any more English-speakers there. But, I told myself, you can’t argue with a must-buy like a $230

Doubts and Redemption on Striking Out Abroad plane ticket. Now, sometimes I still doubt; but mostly I’ve come to realize that if I hadn’t gone, I would have forever regretted it. I would go through the next months and years aching over the chance I’d thrown away, wondering, what if I had gone to Berlin? What unknown turns would my life have taken? It’s a bit hard to think that way with respect to old suburban Pasadena, MD. This aspect made it important that I go; but I was to learn something of even greater value, and that learning is something that always makes leaving one’s comfort zone worthwhile. The second day after I arrived in Berlin, I took the S-Bahn out to a park in East Berlin called Treptower Park. As I was wandering through it looking for some place to hang my travel hammock, I stumbled upon a grand old worn stone gate, shaped kind of like the Arc de Triomphe if you want to imagine it. The path before the gate was dark and shaded by trees; but I remember that inside the gate, the light was bright enough to obscure anything I might have been able to see in there beyond the path. I have a picture looking through the gate with three distant walking figures silhouetted in bright sunlight, like a still from a movie or something. Walking through the gate, the sounds of the outside world faded away, the same way they do when you enter a cemetery; and I soon found out that this was in fact a cemetery of sorts. It was called simply the Soviet Memorial, and was created to honor the soldiers of Soviet Russia who had died fighting the specter of National Socialism in World War II. Seven thousand fallen Russian soldiers were buried and memorialized there. Tucked away into a corner of Treptower Park, far from the city center, it was easy to see how few tourists ended up there; I had never heard of it. Inside the gates the tree-shaded path opened up into a small sunlit plaza with a humble statue where someone had laid red flowers; there was an amphitheater of tall slender trees to the west, and to the east were broad avenues of the same trees extending up to a central edifice, which itself presented a view eastward down across a vast expanse of mosaicked stone and gardens toward a monolithic capital-S Statue on a hill. The statue on its pedestal on its hill was taller than the treetops, and was unequivocally the center of gravity of the memorial. The statue had simple symbolism: a man with a sword, a rescued babe cradled in one arm, was shown standing quietly victorious over a broken swastika. As I mentioned, and as it has also seemed to me upon returning since, the sun seemed to shine a little brighter there; the wind was more gentle, the quiet more restful. I wandered around with the few other visitors for a while, taking pictures and working through the inscriptions in German. Eventually I came back to the central edifice and nestled up into on a stone nook and just sort of sat and breathed and looked around for a bit. I wrote in my notebook, read a little bit of

Doubts and Redemption on Striking Out Abroad David Foster Wallace, and eventually I must have nodded off. When I woke, the air of the place had changed; more and darker clouds were rolling in from the east, heralding rain. More people had gathered on the eastward-facing steps viewing the Statue, and their postures were wearing the relaxed contentment of an indefinite stay. It was quiet. And I had attained a unique mindset; I was content to just sit and open my mind up patiently without seeking anything in particular. Almost in a Zen way, but requiring much less concentration. Maybe Zen-like in a Zen-paradoxical way. And soon I began to have these glimpses of insight into the memorial. It registered on me that the entrances had been only on the west end in order to restrict the view of the statue to one direction, and that direction was eastward: toward the Motherland, in memoriam. And I noticed that the trees all being the same kind of tree and size around the outside made it seem as if the park were surrounded by a giant-sized impenetrable hedge; it created an insular effect in the park, but more importantly I now saw that the trees’ hedge was hedge-sized in proportion with the height of the statue, and that the improbably broad avenues were sized that way for the strides of giants. The gestalt effect was of a park designed to fit the heroic figures memorialized in it and buried within, instead of sized to the comparatively tiny and itinerant travelers who might visit it. These realizations—I realized—came only after I had spontaneously begun an attitude of patience there in the monument, after I had given up any pretense at a schedule (for I was, after all, thousands of miles from anyone who even knew my name, and no one would expect me home for dinner). I had assumed the attitude of a student of a single painting, who will sit in front of it for hours letting it open itself up to him, allowing it to offer up its secrets. I had found patience. It is a wonderful, empowering feeling. And this was the lesson I felt I was being taught then: patience will reward you. Since then I’ve settled down and become much happier here. I walk and eat more slowly. I wait for the little do-not-walk man to turn green. I don’t mind missing trains, oversleeping, or being informed that this perfect apartment has already been snapped up, or this particular job filled. Most important of all, I am much more content with my decision to leave everything and come to a new and strange place. With such a realization about patience, you can see how it would be easy for me to think I had made the wrong decision in coming to Berlin. That I ought back home to have relaxed and been patient with my slow-to-hire employer-to-be’s; to have sat back and enjoyed the time I had to contemplate and wonder and worry about my future. But if I had stayed at home, I would only have kept on with the same frustration and impatience. It may be that I will run out of money and I will have to ask my parents to bail me out and fly me back to the US. But if this was a mistake, it was a mistake well worth making; how else would I have realized in the same deep way the value of patience? I’m

Doubts and Redemption on Striking Out Abroad sure it’s not the only thing I will learn. It’s a cliché, but travel does change you, often in unexpected ways. And now it is my flip-flops that are wearing thin, not my thankfulness. I still don’t have a job, and I must walk a half-marathon every day here trying to find one, or, sometimes, trying to get away from trying to find one. But every night as I climb into my 14-euro hostel bed with seven other itinerant wanderers, I feel compelled to thank the Higher Power of My Understanding for letting me be here, for giving me the patience to enjoy it and for helping me find the wisdom to learn from it. Doubt is a natural reaction to making frightening leaps; but the leaps, I think, are worth the doubt and the fear. Even if leaving everything behind and striking out on your own is not always the right thing to do, it is almost always, I believe, a right thing to do.