Taryn Pilgrim Has Come Unstuck in Time
This is a difficult reflection to compose. The past two weeks have been so entirely jam-packed that it’s challenging to make a coherent thought of it in any respect. One moment I was in London on the Tube and the next, I was in Krakow, and the next, Rome, and the next, Siena. Tomorrow I go to Brussels, Belgium, and then return for three days before heading to Kos, Greece. Then I have three days left in the Villa and in Florence before I make my way to Lourdes, France for two weeks and then home. Where did time go? Why does it feel like we just arrived here, but also that sitting in the Buonamici lounge in Rome, being advised not to take naps while we were adjusting to the time change, was a million years ago?
I am a person who worries about not cherishing things enough. (I think my very first reflection touched on this a bit. How long ago that was!) I will be pitched into a down-spiral of stress and guilt if I even consider running out of time in a place, leaving it without experiencing it to the fullest. This comes from a fear of my own laziness, a fear of my poor planning and lack of daily motivation. In the moment, it’s so easy to let time slide here. It’s so easy to say, oh I’ll go into Florence tomorrow. I’ll sit on my computer today, or I’ll go talk to my friends in the other wing of the Villa later. I’ll have more time then.
I know, both from friends who have made this journey in the past and from my knowledge of my own tendencies, that the second I leave it, I will wish with all my heart to come back to these moments. It’s a terrifying and exhausting way to live, always afraid that you aren’t living the moments you are given to the highest degree, and by its own nature it spoils the very moment in which you think it, furthering the cycle. There has to be some happy medium, some way to cherish the way that we are here and now without pre-emptive regret of its inevitable change. I am looking for this way.
I am also one who has the tendency toward nostalgia, and maybe in that rests my solution. Even now, before we have left this place, with its green shutters and white pillared classroom and that amazing view, I already miss it. My heart has begun to look at the Villa with the fondness of someone returning to a place they once knew, not a place they are leaving for the first time. I miss the staff already, and look at each interaction with them as an opportunity that will likely not arise in my life again. Why haven’t I been behaving this way the entire time? How have I taken a single moment of it for granted?
In four months, when I am packing to return to school, will I miss the simplicity of making due with these same six outfits and a packet of travel laundry detergent? In eight months, when I’m preparing to take fall semester finals and it’s slushy outside and I don’t want to walk to the cafe, will I miss standing in the snow in a Krakow midnight instead, the cold seeping through my ruined boots? In ten months when the Raven Walk has again become the enemy, and it’s raining, and all my classes are in the third floor of the FAC, will I miss trudging up that impossibly long hill to the Settignano bus stop (or sprinting down the back way to hopefully catch its second stop)? In a year, when I am preparing to leave Benedictine College for the last time as a student, preparing to make that walk across that gym, will I remember what I have learned in all the missed trains, forgotten umbrellas, hours of wandering lost, awkward language barriers, and misunderstood cultural cues?
I hope so. I hope I will remember all these things and more. And in our last two weeks here, I hope I can see my time here as a thing untouchable and unchangeable, perfect as it is and in what it was. I hope I will see it for its abundant blessings and lessons and joys, and not let myself fall into comparison, remorse, and disappointment. Regret is the enemy. Regret changes nothing.
And ultimately, there is nothing here to regret. There has been only grace, only gifts. Inconvenience is adventure regarded poorly. Failure is learning seen with pride. I hope I will remember this time, the people I’ve met, the things I have seen, the ways I have grown, with all the fondness and gratitude it deserves. I hope that I can cherish my time left here, but more importantly, cherish my memories of here, without it being stained by my greedy desire to grab onto more of it, keep more of it, than I am able to. All moments are passing, and no matter how tightly I hold onto them, they are sand, and they will slip through my fingers. The only thing I can do is to love it while it’s here, and refuse to spoil it with regret when it goes. The time will pass regardless of my attachment to it, and these people, this place, will have to pass from my life too.
