Helloooooo loyal readers. Just because I’m home doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about my blog!! Sorry for the delay, just been making the rounds on my back to America tour.
Crash Landing
It was a chaotic return in every sense. I pulled off the surprise for my sister, had a belated birthday party with my friends, and fought my jet lag all in 48 hours.
I thought after that bender of a weekend, I would have myself a relaxing week at home, reconnecting with family, walking my dog, and finally not sleeping in a bunk-bed/couch-at-a-friends/field-in-Spain.
Wrong!
When you come home from a four-month adventure, you’re bound to have lots of catching up to do. The combination of that and the classic doctors/dentist appointment catch-up has left me with very few idle days.
I’ll spare you the riveting account of my dental cleaning and give you some highlights from the last few weeks.
Home
When I got home, lots of friends from Boston and New York joined up to celebrate my birthday. It was such an amazing welcome and fun way to reconnect with my buddies and hear about their lives. (Shout out to Mandy and Neloy for planning this event…Neloy you finally got that blog mention, champ!)
I have the most incredible friends. Within 24 hours of touching down on American soil, they took me out to dinner at my favorite restaurant and threw me a birthday party. Aside from being touching gestures, they also forced me to get over my jet lag as quickly as possible. As if I was going to miss a night out.
Aside from catching up with friends and family, I’ve been using my time at home to invest in some personal interests and goals.
I was lucky enough to fly down to DC last weekend and visit the American Enterprise Institute, one of my favorite think tanks. I was invited to a program featuring some of their senior fellows and got to learn about the latest in American politics.
The program took place on Friday so on Saturday I took the train up to New York to tick off another to-do item: a half marathon. I’m an avid runner and have always wanted to bag the 13.1 miles. I was lucky enough to run the race with my friend Akash in Brooklyn.
Proud of Akash for running this race, not proud of Akash for claiming he was gonna “take it easy” and “probably be slower than me” THEN finishing five minutes faster
Thanks to these cuties for cheering me on
I decided to run a half marathon while I was in Elgin. I had been running along the coast every morning and figured that I might as well put the training to good use. More than that, this year has been a time for me to achieve some of my non-academic/professional goals. I’ve always wanted to run a major race (and hope to do a marathon next year). So why not?
Not quite as beautiful and clean as the city streets of Brooklyn
While this isn’t the part of the blog where I’m going to reflect on how my travels have ~changed me~ in the context of my “normal life,” I will say that most of my mental stamina and self-affirmation during the race came directly from my experience on the Camino de Santiago. I kept telling myself: I walked 20-odd miles a day for a month, so I sure as hell can run 13.1. The phrase “ultreia, susceia” kept drifting through my mind as the miles passed by. It’s a Latin phrase often used by Camino pilgrims: “keep going, keep growing.”
Another home highlight: the annual Harvard-Yale football game, a huge event for students and alums.
I am writing this just 24 hours after returning home from yet another weekend in NYC. I drove up and down with one of my best friends, Neloy, and met up with college buddies from all over the country.
Alums often go to New York City for the weekend of the game because so many end up in the city after college working as swanky tech/investment/whatever analysts. So there I was, in yet another big city, but back with the gang. It was so refreshing to travel to see friends, not to just wander all alone (though that’s fun too).
Harvard-Yale is an endurance event. Marathon, not a sprint.
Here’s the basic overview: Going out Friday night, getting to Yale the next morning, surviving a 5-hour tailgate, watching the game, getting to the train station by 5, taking the train back to NYC, and going out YET AGAIN. Ugh… I’m too old for this.
So here it goes:
Friday night we ended up staying out until I’m-not-willing-to-admit AM, fully aware that we needed to wake up at 6 am for a 7 am party bus to New Haven for the game. Carine, why would you do something so dumb!?!?! Well folks, I didn’t want to stay out that late, but only the guys of the friend group (read: poor-decisionmakers) were able to make it to NYC that weekend, so there I was running after them like mother goose until the wee hours of the morning.
The next morning (aka three hours later) I woke up with a burning rage. My first grumpy-morning-thought was: I have to put on an outfit, makeup, and drink a mimosa at 7 am on a moving bus to blaring music?
But after ten minutes and a cup of Dunkin cold brew and I was ready to rumble.
Going on a party bus in a non-high-school-prom scenario with all of your best friends is a game changer. We were dancing for the entire two hours it took to get to Yale.
When we got off the bus, I looked at my watch: 10 am.
We all rubbed our eyes at the sight of sunlight and shuffled off to the tailgate, the only part of Harvard-Yale that really matters. It matters so much, I might add, that some students/alums forget to even go watch the football game *cough, cough* … yup, I did not see one single football that weekend.
After five hours of rigorous tailgating, finding Luke (that story is simply too long for this blog), and getting some scrumptious KFC, we hopped on a two-hour train back to the city. Exhausted doesn’t even come close.
And what do our idiotic asses do when we arrive? We go out again.
Faith
Well loyal readers, here’s the part you’ve all been waiting for…feelings and ~personal growth~!!! Yayyyyyy
There’s no easy way to transition from tailgating with your friends to your personal spiritual life. So let’s just jump in, shall we?
Coming home has forced me to reflect on how my perspectives are changing through my travels. For the next three weeks, I’m going to post a series of shorter essays (woohoo!!! No more 15-minute reads!!) on the following topics: faith, independence, and openness.
As my loyal and competent readers have surmised, I am Catholic and I’m doing lots of Catholic things on this fellowship (disregard the NYC partying). The whole point is to spend a year visiting religious communities, meeting different people, and serving in order to confront my own beliefs and sort them out.
Despite being on a “yearlong pilgrimage” of sorts, I am not crazy about sharing my religious experiences in my blog. The thing is, I’m not fully comfortable writing about my faith. I even struggle to articulate these changes to friends and family. I’m one of those good, old fashioned, keep it to yourself types. And I do think I could do better at being vulnerable and opening up and blah blah but I’m working on it, ok!!
Anyway, complaints aside, I see this fellowship as a blessing and privilege and I think it would be utterly ungrateful not to share the religious changes going on in my life as a result of my adventures.
Why I Wanted to Spend a Year Praying/Traveling
I was raised in a traditional, religious family. We are Melkite and Maronite Catholic, two sects of Catholicism from the Middle East. As a child, I attended mass in Lebanese every Sunday with my family, my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. I loved the cultural community I found through my church and regarded faith as an important part of my life mostly because of its cultural significance. At the same time, I attended a Roman Catholic all-girls school called Ursuline Academy. This is where I learned the nitty gritty of Christianity and found myself in general agreement with the gist of it. This may come as a shocker, but Jesus seemed like a pretty good role model.
But the thing is, being Catholic was super easy during these times. I spent six out of seven days of my week in religious settings with religious people who told me how to pray and when. And when I wasn’t at school/church, I was a giant nerd with no time outside of studying to get into trouble. So circumstantially, I was a good little Catholic girl.
Cue college!!!
The cliche is that college students lose faith because of all the !depravity! you encounter in college settings (say no to drugs!). While I might have missed a few masses because I was out too late the Saturday before, the ~depraved college environment~ didn’t make me disregard my faith. It was more the Harvard thing. I was surrounded by lots of successful, interesting people and incredible opportunities and I simply made them more important that my faith life. A good internship, a better grade, a prestigious leadership position. Those became idols.
Soon, I wasn’t sure if faith was worth it. I wasn’t sure what the point of all the trouble was. I was having enough fun and the general feeling of emptiness here and there could be easily distracted by a hard class, an intense extracurricular, or a night out with friends. I can be religious when I’m old, I often told myself. So instead of focusing on faith, I focused on those things and went to church most Sundays just to check a box. Wow, I thought to myself, I can really do it all.
Well turns out that my part-time Catholic thing crashed and burned when life got harder. Last year I found myself having that classic pre-graduation crisis about what I was going to do with my life and thinking: how can I know what I want to do if I don’t know what kind of person I want to be and what I believe?
Did it Work?!
Basically there was something missing in my life and I now have the chance to figure that out. I decided that the missing piece was faith and banked an entire year on that notion (though I’ve also built up lots of confidence and self-empowerment and blah blah throughout this time, too).
So how’s that going?
My faith is stronger.
In large part, this is because I have been so touched by the generosity and goodness of others. “Seeing Jesus” in someone else is always testament to God’s love, in my opinion. Whether it was a conversation on the bus, a helping hand on the Camino, or a place to crash in London, I’ve seen goodness in others without even asking for it.
Another reason my faith has strengthened: I’ve actively worked on it. I’ve visited religious places all over Europe to have time to think and reflect while also learning from the people around me: how they pray, what they believe, how they treat others. There’s a level of regularity to their practice that I’ve learned is crucial: you have to make time for your prayers/mediations/whatever floats your boat. Otherwise life gets busy. Whenever I’m traveling between places I lose that schedule and often feel a bit unmoored. (Consistent) practice makes perfect.
I’ve come to a pretty big conclusion: I like my faith.
It was a realization I didn’t know I needed.
To like your faith is different than to simply practice it. You can practice out of fear (good old Catholic guilt), out of familial obligation, or even out of habit. But to believe because you want to, because you think it’s right and good…that’s a whole different story.
If you’re not sure whether you like religion, it becomes easy to disregard it. Being religious is cumbersome. It takes time and dedication. It takes sacrifice.
But now that I’ve spent four months (!) thinking about faith, I know that I like it. I know I want to explore it out of my own volition. It’s brought me a deep sense of joy and purpose and has given me a moral roadmap that not only makes sense to me but helps guide my decisions.
And it gives me security, above all. I trust there’s a plan. Now this doesn’t mean I’m doing reckless shit in foreign countries and thinking “well God will protect me.” Rather, it means that when I’m unsure or worried about my future or what life choices to make, I feel more confident that there’s a plan and that I am currently living that plan.
And the best part is that my journey just started. I’ve made the big decision that religion is a cool, mysterious, and fundamentally good adventure to pursue. And now I get to pursue it.
P.S. Do you want to be a nun?
No.
This is the most frequent question I’ve gotten since coming home. Newsflash, you can be religious without wanting to be a nun (you can also still be religious and tailgate for five hours straight cuz Jesus never said thou shall not send it).
So to all the moms that read this blog, dry your tears because your sons are still in the running ;)