February 10, 2023
Presence in the Present
As I jam to bluegrass music and write my blog, I am amused by the reality of my situation. I’m in India; I have been for some time now. How’d that happen? And yet, I feel like our group’s vocabulary changed overnight from, “We just got here,” to, “The end is near.” In a regular UW quarter, this is a common topic of conversation. I guess the benefit of the quarter system is that there are few enough weeks in a quarter that you can easily count them. But I haven’t felt the urge to make a comment about it this quarter, and I think it’s because these six weeks have felt different than any other.
I guess in more places than just the weeks of the quarter, I recognize simple things feeling very different. I first recognized this when I got to catch up with one of my friends this morning on a call. I hadn’t seen her face or heard her voice since departing from Seattle, and as she asked me her typically thoughtful questions and listened with her skillful attentiveness, I realized I was out of practice articulating my state of mind like I was used to at home. My days are spent very differently; my appetite and meals are different, and even my interest in bananas has made a 180-degree transformation, and yet it’s still me.
But even as different as I feel about things in India, life at home has not stopped. I got to call my parents after our morning activities and was happy to hear about a very familiar life. They were upset that they had not won any Bingo games in the last two weeks. My father’s birthday is on Friday, and they spoke about having cocktails and his favorite foods to celebrate including pizza, Cheez-its and Dots. They even mentioned their plan to avoid any travel during this weekend as the Superbowl and PGA golf tournament both were happening only 30 minutes away from them – I wonder what they’d think of Bangalore’s traffic.
After touching base with home this morning, it felt good to come back and focus on the work to be done in India. Team Biome returned to a favorite café to eat lunch and work on our project. We developed some initial responses to the solution section of the 16 questions, then used our answers to help build our initial report. I appreciate the fun we can have with each other amidst these deadlines, including our typical card games, “oohing” and “aahing” over photos of wells, poking fun at my inability to transfer water from my bottle to my mouth without a pitstop on my shirt, and laughing at our universal struggle with active listening (we’re working on it)!
Overall, I am happy to be here in India. I am grateful to have amazing peers along with me and an especially spectacular team. I am pleased to see my growth in trusting the process, and I am eager to see where we all land on week ten. But we’re not there yet; we’re here. So my plan will be to enjoy it while I’m in it.
By Chloe