BUDAPEST IS BURNING

Keep your friends close and make friends with those you’re going to be close (in proximity) with. The past semester would have been nothing without the astonishing, goofy, entertaining, talented, thoughtful, and smart people I met along the way. I left Budapest with many more friends than I arrived with, and that alone would have made this semester a success story. But on top of that, I got to visit some of my favorite people in new homes across Europe. I spent time in eleven different countries with a number of friends, old and new. What a hollow experience this all would have been without them.

I am an incredibly lucky person. I do not entirely deserve all I have done and what I have seen in the past six months. But as a good friend recently said, “I’ve made a lot of good decisions in my life to end up in this airport.” I’m feeling humbled and motivated. I realize that I’ve been living most peoples’ dreams lately, but I’ve also been striving to live my own dream. It’s not all Western privilege, and it sure as hell isn’t all my own doing, but like most things in this world, it’s a blend of things that has delivered me here. 

Good conversation is an art form and it’s one that is destroyed by electronic communication (like Skype). I plan on filling the coming months with many face-to-face conversations, hopefully with people like you, who I haven’t seen in far too long.  

I’m still incredibly shaken and I hope, whatever you’re doing, that you’re shaken too.  I know I’ll continue to think about the last six months and what they meant/mean for a long time to come, but for now, I can rest easy feeling shaken – I think we all need that feeling more than we care to admit.     

“Everything will be okay in the end.  If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

(Source: budapestisburning)

This too shall pass. As I prepare to step over yet another metaphorical threshold in my journey through life, I’ve realized, for the first time, genuinely, that everything will come to pass. The good and the bad times alike will eventually be over. It sounds simple, cliché even, until you come to understand the weight of it for yourself. I’ve been looking ahead to this European adventure for months, and now it’s done. It happened. It was real and now I’m on to the next chapter. Luckily for me, this chapter was a wonderful one and the next chapter is one to be pretty happy about as well. But even if the next chapter is something daunting or unpleasant, it too will eventually pass, so don’t wish your time away. From now on I will spend more moments being thankful for the moment itself, less nostalgic wanting for the past and less fretting over the future. I have faith that tomorrow will come. All we can do is the best we can do in the here and the now, because time will pass us by either way.    

(Source: budapestisburning)