With the emergence of autumn, Brian and I also feel like we are moving into a new stage of life here. Maybe, just maybe, we feel more settled (or at least as settled as we can feel in a dorm room with no kitchen facilities! :). Our friend Jen, who has also lived abroad, wisely advised me that feeling “settled” is hard to describe or anticipate. Perhaps the cooler air yesterday alerted me that we have also arrived at this elusive state of being without knowing it. For us, being settled means that preparing our daily breakfast has become an ingrained habit (as opposed to laboring to decide how we keep milk with no fridge, make coffee with no drip coffeemaker, or eat cereal with no spoons or bowls). Feeling settled means we know what to expect in our daily classes, we are comfortable with our teachers and classmates, we can figure out how to get from point A to point B in this city, and we recognize people in church each week. We are aware that there is still much for us to learn, yet we no longer have the wave of confusion and fear threatening to overwhelm us. Perhaps feeling settled means that the waves of utter and terrifying bewilderment have subsided.
This fresh season also holds promise for us. A new friend of ours is organizing a trip this weekend to a famous mountain about four hours away called HuangShan (“Yellow Mountain”). HuangShan has apparently beckoned China’s sages, poets, and contemplatives for ages, and I look forward to crafting my own thoughts as we hike to the top, spend the night, and rise early to see what I’ve been told is one of the most beautiful sunrises in China.
Speaking of crafting thoughts, I sense that my thought patterns have changed significantly since I’ve been here. Though it has not been an easy process to be stripped of many comforts and luxuries of the US, we’ve also been stripped of many distractions. I am grateful to relinquish bad habits of mindless internet surfing since our internet is so limited here. I’ve been forced to become a more focused and patient person since everything takes so much time and effort. Yet in that forced discipline, perhaps I’ve gained the stamina and drive we need to study this completely different language and culture.
There’s been a lively conversation in the US the past few months about how the internet is affecting our thought patterns and neurological wiring. Apparently recent studies have concluded that our attention spans are becoming increasingly scattered. We are bombarded with information: music, facts, and images. Subsequently, we don’t know how to respond. People click one link online, read a few seconds, and then click another link (often not even realizing what they are doing). I can’t haphazardly surf the internet here because it takes so long to load each page—I’ve tried to click with reckless abandon, yet find myself stuck when the internet refuses to obey. I am forced to wait for the page to load, but because of the lessened bandwidth, I’ve learned to enjoy each page’s information. I’m surprised how grateful I am for the slower internet, and in general for the discipline that the challenge of life here offers us.
Those are my new thoughts for now. I hope I’ll have even more of them after our mountain hike this weekend. For now, my next challenge is figuring out how I can satisfy this craving for pumpkin pie and baked apples! While apples are bountiful, and I have a steamer that may work for cooking them, I have yet to find cinnamon…..next blog post: cooking and food in China! :)