NEW ZEALAND TRIP POST: Trying Out Shoes

8/24

Well they don’t call it hard work for nothing!  It’s been two days and while I think I’ve actually had it pretty easy in regards to manual labor, my body is beginning to disagree.  I guess you could say that all the aches and pains I’m feeling are just a really good lesson in appreciation.

I say this because while it may have only been a short time so far, I have definitely found myself feeling very appreciative lately.  Back when I interviewed for this opportunity, I was told that the work would be hard so I expected it but I never had any idea how taxing even the simplest tasks on the work site would be.  Basically, when we got our first work assignments, I thought I had lucked out when they said I would be painting.  Sure I wanted to use tools and learn new skills but I thought that painting would be a good way to ease into my experiment in construction work.  Well in hindsight, I couldn’t have been more wrong.  I’ve been on the painting crew for two days now and even though I have painted before, as I rolled the ceiling, craning my neck to see what I’m doing, I found myself thinking how I would not be able to do this for a living and how much more respect I have for people that do.

The moral of this story is that we need every single person and their skill set to make this world work.  In every community, we each play our parts.  For example, maybe you are an architect and you can design the most breathtaking buildings but without the people choosing to work on construction crews, you’re really not doing anything more than doodling.  And in turn if you are on the team constructing a building, you would be lost without the blueprint instructions that are provided by the architect.  This is only one example but most of the time it takes a team to help make the final product come to fruition. 

We all have our ways of contributing to this world, no matter how big or small but ultimately it is how we all work together that allows us to accomplish things.  Sometimes it's easy to forget that.  Often, we tend to think that we are the most important part of the equation or the star of the show but without a good supporting cast, we wouldn’t be nearly as successful.  Maybe there really is something to the old saying that encourages people to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes to understand exactly what they go through.  I might have put on my own work boots this morning but I definitely took a stroll through someone else's daily routine and I have to say, I will never look at a fresh coat of paint the same.

NEW ZEALAND TRIP POST: Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Off To Work I Go

8/22

Monday comes a little faster when you skip ahead a day and typically Monday means another week full of days spent at a desk.  Every morning, I drink my coffee and type on my computer.  I take my lunch break and come back in the afternoon to more of the same.  Around 5pm, I remove myself from my chair, pack up my laptop, turn off the desk lamp and leave the building behind for yet another day.  Today, I am I million miles away from ordinary. 

We know what we can do.  We know that because its either what we have done or what we feel we are good at.  We gravitate towards jobs or hobbies that play to our strengths but if we didn’t do something completely out of the ordinary every once in a while, how would we know exactly what hidden talents we might actually possess.  By no means do I think that I am a sorority girl hiding a secret flair for all things construction oriented but I do think that I’ve never really tried anything in that field so who am I to rule it out. 

I woke up this morning knowing that for the next two weeks, I would be living in a completely different world.  I would be living a life that very few, including myself, would have expected me to live.  I think that was part of the appeal.  At the end of this trip, I will not be retooling my resume and looking for home remodeling jobs but I will walk away hopefully surprised at myself and how I rose to the challenge that was put in front of me. 

NEW ZEALAND TRIP POST: My Love/Hate Relationship With Time

8/19 & 8/20

So I have this theory that if I personally want something bad enough, somehow or someway, it will get ruined.  I’m the 8^th grader who got the prettiest dress she ever owned and then broke her foot two days before I got to wear it so that I had a matching ivory cast to go with the dress.  I put way too much pressure on New Year’s Eves or Birthdays, which only sets them up to fall short of my expectations.  I am the girl who will find the perfect white sweater and ruin it the first time she wears it to work by getting an ink mark on it.  Overall, it’s taken a lot of major disappointments surrounding big events that has brought me to this conclusion but, ultimately it has caused me to become very hesitant to want things too much.  Go figure that as I sat on the runway watching the rain fall from the plane that I began to get that overwhelming feeling once again in the pit of my stomach. 

When I arrived at Philadelphia International Airport to embark on my latest adventure, I was excited, nervous and about a million other emotions but I was very cautious to make sure I had done everything right.  I arrived 3 hours before my flight, found my gate, exchanged my cash to the correct currency, and made sure everything electronic was charged enough to get me to my first stop in LA.  I even had time to spare.  As I sat down in the waiting area at my gate, I looked out the window.  To my left, outside the windows, the sun was shining as brightly as it had been all day.  To my right, a slightly darker group of clouds were moving in my direction.  Within what was probably an hour but seemed like minutes, the dark clouds engulfed the airport and the rain began to pour from above.  My flight was delayed a half hour, then an hour.  I was still ok because I had about three hours total to play with in order to still make my connection in Los Angeles.  Finally we boarded the plane but I was down to an hour and a half of extra time.  The rain continued to fall.  The plane continued to sit.  The hands on my watch continued to tick away my prefect plans.   2 hours later, I was airborne but ultimately I was screwed.

A million thoughts swirled through my head.  How was I going to get to New Zealand?  Missing my connection meant that I wouldn’t leave until the next night which would mean that I would miss meeting my group and have to figure out how to get our hotel on my own.  Plus I would miss my first day of work.  I sat in my seat staring out the window into the dark sky wishing for a miracle.  As if I wasn’t already stressed about spending two weeks with complete strangers doing manual labor in a foreign country, now I was destined to have this trip start out in the worst possible way imaginable.

11:55pm. Five minutes after my connection to New Zealand was leaving, my flight from Philadelphia pulled into the gate at LAX Airport.  Five minutes would be the reason I would miss two days worth of my trip.  5 minutes. 

You know there are very few things that you can accomplish in 5 minutes.  For example, it took me 10 minutes to find someone at midnight in the LAX airport to tell me where I had to go to find Quantas Airlines and about the same amount of time to take the bus from my current gate to the International portion of the airport.  Normally 5 minutes is such a small practically insignificant amount of time but at this particular moment, it had the potential to inflict monumental damage on my life.  Then my obsession with five minutes was replaced with an obsession over a new amount of time, 2 seconds.  That’s exactly how long it took the man behind the counter at Quantas to tell me that my connecting flight had been delayed until 2:30am and the plane wasn’t even here yet. 

As I sit here on the plane, well on my way to my final destination, it’s beginning to all make sense.  If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that things don’t always go exactly how you expect them to or how you plan them to but life is all about learning to maneuver your way through the twists and turns that come up.  Sometimes it’s time or circumstances that seem to be against you and sometimes they surprise you and end up being on your side when you need them to be.  Stuff happens.  Life intervenes.  We can let the unexpected disasters ruin our experiences or we can continue on just doing the best we can to manage the chaos that comes our way.   I may be a little late but New Zealand here I come!

Back and Better Than Ever

Miss me???  Well don't think you got rid of me that easily!  After two weeks of being away, I'm back and just because I couldn't post, doesn't mean that I didn't write. 
So if you're curious about my latest adventure building houses in New Zealand then stay tuned because I'll be posting all about it over the next couple of weeks...

No Boys Allowed!

It was the Pussycat Dolls who said, “I don’t need a man to make it happen”.   Beyonce told us that girls run the world, Christina Aguilera proclaimed that they can’t hold us down, and Pink sang, “So what I’m still a rock star and I don’t need you tonight”.  And these are just the messages coming through the radio.  So why is that as I get ready to leave for my upcoming trip that it has once again become all about a guy?

Over the past few days, it’s felt like everyone I know is trying to catch up with me.  Everyone wants to get together, everyone wants to chat, and everyone keeps asking me the same questions.  “Are there any cute guys going with you?”  Or “Maybe you’ll meet a hot guy with an accent”.  Of course I smile and laugh it off but I can’t help but think, when did this all become about meeting someone?!

Last November, I applied to go on a trip with Habitat for Humanity.  I impressed the leaders in the interview and got selected.  I raised and saved the money to pay for this adventure.  Every step of this process, I have done on my own without the help of a boy so why would the end result be about a guy? 

For me this trip has been all about me.  I did it because I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone.  I wanted to put myself in a situation with people who aren’t necessarily the people I would interact with in my everyday life.  I wanted to challenge myself and what I am capable of.  I wanted to step away from my normal life and find some adventure.  I wanted to put another stamp in my passport and see a part of the world that I may otherwise never have gotten the chance to.  I wanted to immerse myself in the culture of another country rather than just see it as a tourist.  I wanted to leave my mark and help someone other than myself.  I wanted to learn new skills.  There are about a hundred other reasons why I decided to do this but none of them include falling in love or finding a guy.

I may be single but I prefer to call myself independent.  Every day I wake up and go about the day all on my own, just like I am going to do from the other side of the globe.  I have done ok for myself so far and I’m happy with that.  One day I will have another relationship but for right now I am doing this, no boys allowed!

"I think the key is for women not to set any limits." - Martina Navratilova

Hole in One

The other day, I was out with my brother and some of my cousins playing miniature golf.  This game has sort of become a yearly tradition which everyone from my 8 year old cousin to my 29 year old self not so secretly look forward to every summer but this year I actually learned something more than I am a horrible golfer.

The whole event was pretty much a typical round of mini golf.  There were some good scoring holes and some unfortunate I’ll take a six moments but overall it was pretty uneventful until we stepped up to the 18^th hole.  We played in 3 different groups and my group happened to be the last one to go.  As we patiently waited our turn to play our final hole, we watched the group in front of us take their shots.  The last person in that group to go was my brother and it only took about 5 seconds for him to set up, hit the ball, and have it fall perfectly into the cup for one last hole in one.  After it happened, my 8 year old cousin Abby turned to me with a big smile on her face and said, “I’m going to do that.”  I politely smiled back knowing that a hole in one was easier said than done but she was too cute to tell that harsh truth to.  I watched as she set her little red golf ball down on the green and hit it with her putter.  The ball went sailing towards the hole until it disappeared, right into the cup.  Hole in one.  Seriously?!

I was stunned!  It wasn’t that I didn’t think Abby could get a hole in one, it was more that she predicted that it would happen before it even did.  Personally I think I stepped up to every hole day saying this would be the one that I got the hole in one on but it didn’t happen for me.  The whole thing really made me wonder what it was about Abby stating she was going to get the hole in one that was different than me thinking on every hole that it would finally be my perfect putt.

The difference is actually simple to see.  At some point, we all try to predict things that will happen or secretly want them to happen a certain way but it’s impossible to really know if you will achieve the desired outcome.   I know that even though I want something, there is no way to completely know that it will happen and that keeps me from fullying believing in it's possiblity.   Abby was certain.   She was confident. 

Ok I will admit there may or may not have been a little luck involved in the outcome but maybe the kid is on to something.  We are so used to disappointment or things not working out for us that no matter how sure or confident we are in ourselves or our abilities, we always proceed with caution, hoping for the best but still being ready for the worst.   Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, the blissful innocence faded and we let the doubt creep in.  Its like we are ready with Plan B before we even let Plan A play out or we grab the band-aid before we even start something because there is a chance we could fall.  In both cases we are ready for when we fail, even though there is just as much of a possiblity that we will succeed.  Maybe we should learn stop always analyzing things or weighing the pluses and minuses and just smile, step up to the tee, and believe that great things can happen when we stop doubting everything.  Maybe you'll even get your hole in one.

“It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not.” – Author Unknown

Comfortable Uncomfortable

Sometimes in life, you have to step away from your world.  You have to back off from what you are doing, take a deep breath and recharge your batteries before you continue on.   For me when the calendar page turned to August, I knew that meant that I was dangerously close to doing something that I hoped would be a defining part of this year and this journey but I needed to do something before I set off on my adventure.  I needed to get comfortable before I could be uncomfortable.

Ok that may be a bit confusing but for the last couple of weeks; I stepped away from this blog and this idea of changing and focused on enjoying the things that I am used to.  I spent time with family and friends.  I reconnected with people I hadn’t seen in a while.  I did some reading, played around with my camera, caught up on some television shows and movies, and I even got in some summer beach time.  Overall, I did the things that make me happy and the things that make me feel comfortable without trying to make them different or more exciting.  In two weeks, I head to New Zealand for my trip with Habitat for Humanity and I know that I will be completely out of my element but it will force me to be uncomfortable. 

I’ve said it before, for a while I’ve felt like I was just going through the motions and not really living.  Life just became a little too comfortable.  By pushing myself, seeking out adventure, and trying to become more the person I wanted to be, I hoped to jump out of my safety zone and have more excitement in my world.  The past few weeks have made me see that the things in my life that are comfortable will always be there, no matter how much you try to change and that’s not always a bad thing.  Comfortable is good.  It’s stable.  It’s dependable.  The things in my life that are “comfortable” don’t necessary need to be eliminated but what I really need to do is find a nice balance between the comfortable and the uncomfortable.  So I set out to just do the things that I loved no matter how mundane or lackluster they might be and as I enjoyed the comforts of my life, I was able to appreciate them more than I might have in the past because I still had the adventures in the unknown that lie ahead of me to look forward to. 

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.” – Thomas Merton