The first group of volunteers have completed their service and have headed out on their journeys. It was a sad day for me to say goodbye to friends that have become my family in this country but at the same time it is incredible to look back on the last two years and see how much we have gone through and grown. To look at how we have integrated, how we speak the language, we wouldn't be able to recognize ourselves from the scared trainees that landed more than 2 years ago. Nor, I think, could we even imagine these day, the final days.
On one hand there is this sense of accomplishment and reward and on the other hand, there is a very sad feeling of the goodbyes and the closing of the two years. I have written about this topic before and dont want to beat it to death.
The sense of accomplishment is something I want to focus on in this blog post. Learning the language, community integration, successful and unsuccessful projects and learning from them, group projects, initiatives, and many other aspects of our service contribute to the sense of accomplishment volunteers usually feel. However, one aspect of the sense of accomplishment is a personal success. The amount of personal growth we go through during our PC service is surprising and different for every volunteer. Some people say they dont change, while others change so drastically that they are unrecognizable. Most people fall in the middle of this spectrum and everyone changes whether they want to or not. You can not go through an intense (as it feels at times) two year experience and not have been impacted.
The other night, I went on a TED talks bender. TED talks is according to wikipedia, 'a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate 'ideas worth spreading.'' Basically on their website, they have a list of different videos about all different topics. I was introduced to this website from a professor back in my college days and every once in a while I will watch about 2 hours worth of different videos. They range in all kinds of topics and the other night I went on the topic of happiness. I came across a few videos.
This video from TED talks really spoke to me and about my service: Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability.
The idea of opening up and allowing experiences is pretty impacting. Also when she spoke about courage being from the original Latin word, is to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
There were a few ideas that came from this video that I want to post about. The first is the fact that all human interaction comes down to connection. Making connections with people is vital to our survival and ultimately the way towards happiness. Making connections to ourselves (to continue with the quote 'I am enough'), making connections to others, and making connections to our surroundings. I connected this portion of the talk with another video: Thandie Newton's talk about making connections and losing your sense of 'self' to become a part of the whole. (I told you I went on a bender.)
I think an important part of PC and traveling to extend it is to make connections. The more connections you make, the smaller the world becomes. The more connections you make to people, the more commonalities you find between people. I think this is vital as our world becomes more globally focused. If people realized the humanity found within everyone maybe there would be less war? The less 'otherness' people had means people could not as easily justify wars. Just a thought.
This also goes into what Ms. Brown talked about in her talk. She talked about people making connections and the fear of disconnect. In order for connection, according to her and which I agree with, is the ability to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable we have to be seen, really seen.
She makes other points along the way that I find really interesting. They are:
1. Her study came down to those who felt worthy of love and connections and those who felt they weren't good enough.
2. The people who had a strong sense of love and belonging felt they were worth of love and belonging. It was that simple.
3. She also found that those people had a strong sense of courage. As I mentioned before, courage is the ability to tell your story with your whole heart. They had the courage to be imperfect.
4. They had compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others.
5. "And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection."
This all leads to the fact that they were vulnerable and felt vulnerability was necessary for connections.
She continues the talk with the way we, as a society, have become afraid of vulnerability and have thus have become to numb our vulnerability. She gives examples and could not be more on point. The danger in numbing vulnerability and fear means that we numb all emotions. We cannot selectively numb. We cant say we dont want to feel pain but we will feel joy. We either dont feel either or we feel them all.
She ends the talk with this:
"But there's another way, and I leave you with this. This is what I have found: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee, to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?" just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, "I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive."
And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place I believe that says, "I'm enough," then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves."
Wow. I keep reading this over and over. This part of the talk impacted me the most.
To bring this back to growing in the PC, I viewed this video with a few other volunteers and we had an interesting discussion about the PC service and making you more vulnerable. PC puts a mirror in front of you and if you are open to it, it will show you a lot. You learn a lot of things that you need to work on as well as hidden talents you didnt know you had. For me, that mirror did both and I am better because of it.
PC also makes you more firm in your beliefs. As one friend said, you come here with an idea of who you want to be and PC makes your more confident in being that person. PC kind of fills you out in the idea of who you want to be. For most people, PC doesnt change you completely and turn your world upside down, but it does allow you to grow.
The "I am enough" quote was the most important from the talk and something I am learning how to say, while also learning how to be vulnerable and to tell my story with my whole heart. That is one thing I am trying with this blog and once I am done with PC, I hope to be able to tell more of my story.
Leave a comment if you watched the video, I would love to know what you thought of it.
