bridges

I'm happy. I've decided the point of college!
For the next three years, I will learn how to navigate as many different cultural spaces as possible. This is done by cultivating meaningful relationships with people in those spaces, who will teach me profoundly about their experience. Generally, what people do isn't as important as why they do it.
This is part of a lifelong strategy to find my place in building a culture of global citizenship, in the world, and especially in the United States as the dominating power. (as a disclaimer, note that we all need motivatation. this ideal is my motivation for nagivating different spaces. it is not, however, a normative. I'm too ignorant to lay claim to normatives yet! I lay it out as my bias, here for you:)
One goal I had this spring was to figure out how to cultivate that kind of a culture, amidst so much that runs counter to it--capitalism, segregated communities, guilt and condenscension. I went on a little journey, starting with the realization that #1, my place in all of this is to educate those of my own mother culture (this post). 2, I allowed myself to do some introspection in the cultural arena, and the process helped me internalize a decent amount of pain. 3, I was struck again and again by how much better life would be for everyone if we all spent more time w/those whom we don't understand, and especially those w/whom we disagree. 4, I concluded that basically one of the most wonderful things we can do for each other is to let each other exist--to listen, and to learn, seeking to be in real community (this post). I seek to validate every person's lived experience, while critically acknowledging that while our lived experience is valid, it can be made so much better when we refrain from defining reality for others. This means that I am naturally drawn to the spaces of those at the margins, whose realities have been devalidiated and bastardized to make way for the realities of the more powerful. However, if I stay in the margins, what will change? I must also learn to navigate the spaces of the powerful, that i may validate their lived experiences authentically, in order to make room for the voices of the marginalized to be heard. I'll translate; I'll bridge. I remake myself hundreds of times; people will change me, people will move me, we will become together. It will be a dance of narratives. It will hurt sometimes; I will be hurt and I will hurt others. I'll probably be confused most of the time. But that's the point, right? To heal, to be vulnerable...because then, all that is left for us to cling to is the acknowledgement that love is possible, real, and profound, and love is lived in movement towards one another; love is lived in diffusing fear, in traversing barriers, in tearing down walls and in ripping through insulation.

See why I'm happy?

Who wants to join me...

I know it's going to be hard. (so many spaces have left me wounds that are still fresh...) But if it weren't difficult, would we be so quick to fear, and to condemn? Courage, wisdom, compassion...these are qualities that become part of us when we kick down the fences around our own worlds, in favor of not knowing where my reality ends and yours begins.

Finally, I must add that this process by no means allows for paralysis or non-commitment. If we embrace ambiguity at the expense of determined action, we miss the point of embracing ambiguity in the first place!