Change.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.” —Leo Tolstoy

Space Paintings

I'm in awe.

The pain of a goodbye

Even after my constant moving to and from and in between various places in the past few years, somehow goodbyes never get any easier for me. I get sad when I leave Hawaii after summers and Christmas, I cried when I left Yosemite after living there for 4 months, and I get very sentimental every time I leave my friends at APU. Though my semester in inner city LA was the most difficult time in my college life, the hardest part was saying goodbye to my little host sister. Now the time is coming and passing when I am having to say goodbye to Oxford and the people I have grown close to here. I know everyone hates goodbyes (to some extent), but they seem to be a lot more difficult for me than is typical. I tend to love people very easily and openly, and even if we are not necessarily "best friends" when it comes time to leave, I cannot help but simply dread the moment that inevitably comes when we part ways. It does not matter if we are best friends or close friends or even just roommates, I see beyond what the friendship is at that moment and see instead the potential for what it could have been. 

In the past few years, after studying abroad for 3 of my 6 semesters in college, I have really begun to understand just how realistic (or unrealistic) it is to maintain a long distance friendship. Friends I thought I was really close to when I left APU (or Hawaii or LA or High Sierra) simply would not make the effort to stay in touch. There were times in LA when, even though I was only a 35 minute car ride away from APU, I felt so disconnected from most friends at APU that I honestly might as well have been halfway around the world. Despite how hurtful it sometimes is and how much it forces me to question a lot of my friendships with people, it really does show you which friends care and are there long-term. It distinguishes those friends who will remember you and are willing to put actual effort into the friendship from those whose attention is dependent upon physical presence and whose biggest effort to stay in touch consists of a FB post once every few months. Excuses of having difficult classes, working extra hours, or doing extra curriculars have all come to sound the same to me. In reality, we're all busy, and I've come to discover that busyness is actually quite irrelevant in determining whether or not a person will stay in touch or put effort into maintaining a long distance friendship. You'll make time for those people you care about and want to make time for. And for the others, distance will likely cause you to simply forget. There are a few friends in my life who, after managing to put up with my study abroad addiction and life in the far off land of Hawai'i, I am actually very confident will be important people in my life for a long, long time. As hard as studying abroad continues to be on my friendships with people, it has made me so much more thankful for those certain friends who have consistently made an effort to stay strongly present in my life through it all. 

I think a lot of the anxiety and sadness I feel when saying goodbyes simply stems from the fact that I know when I say goodbye to many of these people, it really does mean goodbye. I've been forced to learn that not everyone stays in touch as they claim they will, and even with skype, facebook, and other technological inventions, distance really is one of the biggest challenges in a friendship. I don't think the day will ever come when I get better at goodbyes, but thank the Lord for people in my life who make it so difficult to say goodbye to.

A Last Glance

Goodbye…

Tears come streaming

And my lips start trembling;

I guess I always knew it had

To end.

Kimberley Winther
March 2011

Life.

Sometimes I have moments where I suddenly realize I basically have no idea what I'm doing with my life. My dreams and aspirations seem to change with each new day and mood I am in. I dream of everything from journalism to counseling to traveling the world to teaching to creating art, and more. I've switched my major more times than I even remember, and the weird thing is that I've actually enjoyed every one of them. I feel like I've had so many unique experiences, jobs, and opportunities, but they are scattered out over a broad range of subjects. Sometimes I love this fact, and other times I think "Where is this going?" I only have one year left of my undergraduate studies, and that freaks me out a little. But I guess that's all part of life, right?

Homelessness

"What kind of problem might homelessness be, if not a housing problem? One common although profoundly wrong theory can be dismissed at once- the opinion expressed by Ronald Reagan and others that the homeless are homeless by choice. The implication of this viewpoint is that homelessness results from an exercise of personal will, not from mental illness, substance abuse, or an inadequate supply of low-income housing. In this view, homelessness is simply not a problem and the homeless are perceived, perhaps, as romantic vagabonds who have traded the rat race of modern urban civilization for a life uncomplicated by mortgage or rent payments, ringing telephones, surly bosses, nagging spouses, and truculent children.

However widespread such a viewpoint may be, no credible scholar who has studied the problem of homelessness takes it seriously. One does read occasionally about a homeless person with a locker full of cash in the bus station, or about a former Wall Street stockbroker who cashed it all in for the romance of life on the road, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, homeless people live as they do because they lack the means to live in any other way, not because they have positively chosen a life of destitution and degradation over some attainable alternative means of living.


Consider what a homeless person would choose by choosing to be homeless. The rate of AIDS infection among the homeless exceeds that in the general population by a factor of 10; the rate of sexual assault on homeless women exceeds that of women in general by a factor of 20; the rate of tuberculosis among the homeless exceeds that in the population at large by a factor of about 100; and the average age of death for homeless men is somewhere around 53 years old. One does not 'choose' to sleep in the gutters or scavenge food from dumpsters."

-James D. Wright and Beth A. Rubin in Understanding Homelessness: New Policy and Research Perspectives

Anyone who doesn't believe there is inequality in the U.S. should read this article:

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