A Sea of Change

I said farewell to Penny today, over breakfast at the bistro table in my crackerbox apartment. She dove into a bowl of cereal and milk sprinkled with raisins while I nursed an iced coffee, both of us musing at the pace with which life bring change.

It's a strange thing, the transiency that permeates life living abroad. I've always considered myself an adventurer at heart, a free spirit with a soul that longs to experience life firsthand from a wide range of geographical perches. My family and friends who know me well, I hope, appreciate this as one of the qualities that defines me, while others who are perhaps less in tune with my curious yet genuinely humanitarian nature might write me off as some kind of a gypsy.

It's true that my life has been a constant stream of movement. Since my early years as a youngster, following my parents along on cross-town and cross-country moves, I became well practiced in the art of packing my things, settling in to a new home, and finding my place among new friends. And the pace only quickened as I reached my college years. I don't think I can truthfully count the number of places I have lived, or the number of times I have moved. But that's okay with me. It's part of the learning curve that is my life, and I wouldn't change it.

Still, it's a reality I have had to adjust to, that here in Korea, I am rubbing shoulders with so many others for whom life is also a sea of change. Most of the foreigners in Korea have come to work as an English teacher for twelve months. That's the standard contract length. Of course, there are a host of expats, mostly settled in and around the suburbs of Seoul, who have chosen to make themselves more of a permanent fixture in Korea. I'm somewhere balanced between the two, for once -- not particularly eager to sprint out of Korea at the first chance I get, though certainly not ready to put down the kind of roots that would keep me for years on end.

With Penny gone, I'm reminded that life is fleeting, that friendships are to be appreciated and savored, and that I am blessed to have been touched by people who have come into my life, bringing rays of sunshine with them. Penny is off to begin another chapter of her life, in the same way that each foreigner I meet will in turn. And then one day, it will be me again who spreads wide my wings and soars to some new perch from which to take in the world around me.

I am grateful to have learned through my life experiences that hellos and goodbyes, while often tinged with emotion, are never final or absolute -- that the world, despite how tremendously large it is, can still in its own miraculous way bring people full-circle back together again. I am grateful that I have learned how to take that feeling of "home" with me wherever it is that I have chosen to be, and that I can be thousands of miles away from family yet still somehow feel "surrounded" with the love, support, and care of those who matter most to me.

Life is a sea of change. Sometimes we drift, sometimes we swim against the current. But always, in the end, it is the sea that carries us beyond our humble beginnings and into the vast and open space where more than we have ever imagined can become possible.