Category Archives: Personal Reflection

04/22/14

Asking myself the right questions.

I had a wonderful talk over coffee and cheesecake with a good friend of mine the other day. We discussed graduating and what was in store for us in the future. We talked about what we wanted out of life and how much we realized we had grown as people in the last five years. It’s fascinating how it’s more often our perspectives, not our passions, which change.

For instance, I always thought I would be a person who would drop everything and fly off to a foreign country for years at a time, working directly in the field of development. As I’ve grown older, experiencing all sorts of relationships and events, I’ve learned that put great value in the personal relationships and community I grow apart of. Suddenly, the idea of flying away by sacrificing what and who I have at this very moment seems surreal. But this shift in mindset is not me changing my mind about my passion. Not at all – I still greatly desire to learn to empower others to empower themselves – especially those who are disadvantaged and vulnerable.  But what I have realized is that pursuing just this sole passion would lead to an empty sort of life for myself.

To put it simply, it’s like I’ve been running towards a finish line of creating my career and in doing so, I have discounted my life as it is at present. I’ve been asking myself, “What do I want to do with my life?” instead of, “How do I wish to live my life?” Just a simple switch in focus in these questions makes an incredible difference in how I relate to myself and my life to come.

I want to be a part of a community – global and local. I want to meet people from all over the world – with all sorts of stories to share. I feel a duty to help my fellow human kin. But I will not pretend to have completely altruistic reasons to live for such things. These are the things that make me happy in my life. The questions I ask myself in how to go about doing all of these things challenge me to broaden my horizons and make me feel fulfilled. From now on, I want to keep asking myself how  I will live my life in the present instead of wondering what the future holds. The future is written here.

04/21/14

Next Stop: Indonesia!

This May, I won’t be walking across the stage of the Chan Centre with degree in hand. Rather, I will be walking through the forests of Indonesia for some evaluation work with Dr. Chris Bennett and my fellow UBC colleagues.

I wouldn’t have ended my undergraduate career any other way.

I don’t think the notion of flying to the other side of the world for six weeks has hit me just yet. Perhaps it’s due to the frenzy of finals and tying up loose strings, but I feel rather calm about leaving for what used to seem like a long period of time. I guess I’ve gotten used to travelling. The timing couldn’t be better: I’ve been feeling rather blasé about pure academics this last semester and I’m pretty strained both mentally and physically. I’m quite due for a change of scenery at least before the Vancouver summer begins.

“So what now?” This question lingers at the back of my mind as I go about my daily routine. I’ve overthought all the possibilities, so much that it makes my head hurt. A break in a new country – a new climate – a new perspective – is just what I need to refresh myself before I decide on my next steps. If anything, I’m looking forward to this trip as a period to embrace the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing next. And that’s it’s okay to be like that.

Next stop: Indonesia. Next stop: the unknown. My adventure awaits.

12/18/13

My next step.

When I made the decision to take an extra semester or more in my degree, I wasn’t sure what I would be doing with it. I just knew that I needed some more time to think over where I was going in life.

My decision to apply for nursing school came in a conversation I had with a good friend during the beginning of summer. She acted as my soundboard of sorts, asking me simple yet crucial questions that we all have to ask ourselves at some point in our lives.

Do I want to work with people?

Do I want to work on the ground or behind the scenes?

Where do I want to live?

What am I getting out of my degree now and how do I want to use that in the future?

I had been struggling to figure out how I could practically apply what I learned in my undergrad to what I wanted to do with my life, but I was left with more uncertainty than anything. In all honesty, after I had come back from volunteering in India, I felt that I had little to offer in terms of practical skill. At least in terms of what I wanted accomplish.

Nursing came up in our conversation just offhand, but the idea stuck with me. I had to laugh because I had spent much of my studies exploring alternative, more holistic models to the dominant biomedical model of health and now I had come back full circle. The decision to become a nurse just made sense with my goal of understanding and being able to better human health at a large scale – it was the missing piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t keep ignoring. Biomedicine was dominant in terms of healthcare for a reason and I was going to learn to play the game. I wanted to blend what I learned about holistic health through my studies with the world of biomedicine to ultimately create a larger picture of health and wellness.

I took a long time to play with the idea of nursing school. What were my other options? What did a nurse really do? Why a nurse and not a doctor? Would nursing really broaden my horizons as technical and practical as it was? In the end, it was how I perceived nursing to fit into everything I had learned at this point. Nursing would provide me with practical skills to offer not just locally but in demand internationally. It had flexible enough hours to sustain a well-balanced life and dealt with much one-on-one care with patients. Both of these points contrasted the long hours and little patient-time experienced by doctors. Ultimately, I foresaw that nursing would become my medium for applying what I learned about development and global (public) health in my undergrad. I would be more than just a simple nurse. And with the flexibility in different career paths as a nurse, I felt that a lot of doors would open for me through becoming a nurse.

So here I am many months later, finishing up my prerequisites for nursing school. I still question if this is the right decision but then I tell myself that I have no way of knowing that. All I know is that I feel that it is a step in the right direction. At least for now. Life can swerve you in all sorts of directions after all. All I can really do is keep marching forward always absorbing, reflecting, and communicating.

 

06/18/13

The world of Capoeira.

I won’t lie, I was nervous. Terrified even. I knew that Capoeira was difficult to get into and I knew that I would have trouble keeping up in class. But I had already made up my mind to go. So I got on the skytrain to the Capoeira studio downtown. I reminisced back to moments in my life when I had felt just as nervous as I did on the transit ride to my first Capoeira class. Travelling solo for the first time. Learning to play Broadway-level music in my high school pit orchestra. In both of these instances, I worked my hardest and I persevered. I became more confident than ever.

So feeling this nervous for Capoeira was a good sign. It meant that I was on my way to starting something worthwhile.

I was introduced to wonderful world of Capoeira before I even set foot in the studio. Immediately upon seeing me, I was greeted warmly by people who were also there for the class. My colleagues. The butterflies in my stomach disappeared. Seeing all of these smiling faces of people from all kinds of backgrounds made me grin back wider. I experienced the Capoeira community for the first time and I felt I had already been welcomed into their group. Greetings were exchanged through hugs and kisses as more students showed up and together we entered the studio.

Despite its appearance, the studio felt more like a home than anything else. I can’t really explain it. Everyone was helping out by turning on the lights, sweeping, and playing with one another as they got ready for class. It really was like I had stepped into another world flecked with the heavy influences of Brazilian culture. I started to get really pumped for the class.

The class itself was everything I expected and more. It was difficult but I didn’t feel like I lagged behind anyone. When I was in pain, we were all in pain. When drops of sweat dripped down to the floor, I could see the sweat streaked across the faces of my colleagues. When we counted, we counted together (in Portuguese no less). The movements were challenging and graceful. We swayed together in the ginga, blocking off invisible attacks and flexing out our own kicks. I felt like I was dancing and training in a martial art at the same time… and yet, playing Capoeira was unlike any dance or martial art class I had ever taken. It was just Capoeira. And I loved it.

For the last segment of class, we played together in a sparring circle called the Roda. Drums and the tamborine set the rhythm as everyone sings the melody to which Capoeira will be played. A Capoerista enters the roda and faces off with another Capoerista in a series of round kicks, gingas, and escapes. Altogether the game looks like an graceful dance between two colleagues and each capoerista is replaced as another colleague enters the roda. With the encouragement from the instructor, I entered the roda as well, looking forward to future times when I would be able to do much more.

My colleagues came up to me to ask if I liked the class and I told them I enjoyed it tremendously. The music, the movements, the discipline, and especially the community I experienced during this hour was impossible not to fall in love with. I couldn’t wait to come back again.

I raised my head high, waved my colleagues goodbye and walked out of the studio drenched in sweat and feeling the best I had ever felt in a long time.

06/9/13

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I was writing a rant/vent post about how frustrated I was with how little I seemed to be progressing in terms of change. I hated how I was dwelling on my problems and there seemed to be no end in sight.

Then I deleted it.

I was writing it as I vented about it to a friend but I had a revelation as we talked. And suddenly, I wasn’t venting anymore. I was working things out in a positive way to overcome my problems and she acted as my soundboard. After that mental click, what I had been writing as a tumblr post suddenly didn’t seem so useful anymore.

So here’s a new post – one that highlights what I have learned and the tools I am utilizing to make peace with myself.

We as individuals are responsible for our happiness. No one else… although we have the penchant for blaming the world and others as excuses not to pursue our own forms of happiness.

I am sick of dwelling on the past, on negativity, and on apathy. I don’t want to make excuses anymore.

I used to bottle up emotions. I learned to talk and reach out for help. I learned to vent. But now venting is leading me to dwell. There is a step missing in reaching my goals and I’ve stalled in my progress.

I used to think that activities like running, reading, and exercise were a way to run away from these problems. And I’ve been looking to become at peace with inner issues through the discovery of external solutions or just time. But this is the link: running isn’t distracting me from my problems – it’s a way to stop dwelling on them so I can overcome them. It’s replacing negativity with positivity. It’s saying ‘can’ over ‘can’t’. 


I’ve found my answer.

04/29/13

Through the shadows.

It’s been exactly five months since I returned from India – from being nearly a year abroad. It’s surreal even to look back on how much time has passed and all that has happened until today.

The effects of reverse culture shock kept me company through this semester and the days weren’t always easy to cope with. No matter how much I had mentally prepared myself to embrace the repercussions of being away for so long, I had never expected to have everything hit me so hard. I came back feeling more confident in myself than ever. However, in this familiar – yet unfamiliar – environment, I was at a complete loss of what to turn to now that I had returned. I had envisioned my overseas experience for years that now that graduation and the prospect of ‘real life’ starting, I was struck with fear and hesitancy.

I didn’t know what role I held in this place I called ‘home’ anymore. It was as if the entire world was my oyster, but I didn’t know what to do with it. The future was a huge blank canvas.

What will I do with my degree? Where do I go from here? These questions ran through my brain again and again.

I can’t really explain what it was that caused it because it really was a combination of everything that was happening and not happening to me: I fell into depression. The world turned dark. I came back home but couldn’t find solace in it. Everything had come to a complete stop after moving around for so long. The once passionate spirit I had disappeared in a puff of smoke. I was in utter anguish, floating through a sea of sadness. And suddenly I washed ashore and felt nothing. No pain. No sorrow. No happiness or zeal for life. Just emptiness. I couldn’t even feel fear for the situation I had found myself in. I became a shadow of my former self.

It took everything I had to call for help. And once I did, things did get a bit easier. My colleagues in the GRS program, Brent and Roxana, my professors, counselors, family and friends were extremely supportive of me during this delicate stage. But I knew it wouldn’t be that easy to get rid of depression and I was correct. It didn’t go away. No matter how many people I had behind me, this battle was entirely my own. And I had to learn to put on a braver face than I had ever done before.

I once said to myself that being terrified was a good thing because it meant I was doing something incredibly worthwhile. Testing yourself to your very limits, finding peace with yourself as a person, and emerging from the shadows standing taller than ever – this is the adventure we call Life. It is now the end of April and I am just starting to feel like myself again. I see the magic in everyday things like I used to. I feel stronger (although not invincible) because I experienced what it was like to feel absolutely nothing. And through those dark times, I came to the realization that my passionate spirit was not easily crushed. While I lay motionless on the ground, I could still see the glimmer of blue sky. It was a little voice in my head that told me that I had something to still live for. It told me that I would fly again one day.

Through depression, I learned just how strong I was. And I feel more terrified and braver than ever. And despite the turmoil that I experienced the last few months, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I embrace the depression – this weaker side of myself… because even that side is stronger than I ever thought possible.

02/11/13

Hesitation.

An old high school classmate struck up a chat with me on Facebook last night. He had recently graduated and was looking for work. He shared his worries over having possibly made a bad decision by going to university rather than a professional school to advance his career. He wondered where his life would take him from now on.

So I asked him about his dreams. What he wanted out of life.

What he said was an answer that I often hear from people around me. It was rational. Sensible. Future-oriented and built around security over blind leaps of faith. I couldn’t help but wonder again and again, if that was all that there was to life.

Life is what you make of it. But the pressures of the society in which we live and the relationships we have with the people we love can lead us to put our heart’s desires second to everyone around us.

I feel this way, just like this old classmate of mine does. Just like each and every one of us does. And no one is blatantly pressuring me to live a certain way. They ultimately want me to be happy (whether or not their idea of happiness coincides with mine is another question). Security and consistency is the warm blanket we wrap ourselves in, often disguising as ‘happiness’.

The uncertain future ahead of me is a blank canvas, which both excites and terrifies me. Probably more the latter at the moment. I feel constrained because I know what I want out of life, but have the need to consider the financial and comfort aspects in the choices I make. I’m holding onto the blanket of home life tightly, not completely ready to let go. But I know that this life doesn’t make me happy.

No one is pressuring me yet everyone is. I feel like I have a need to explain what it is I will be doing after graduation when really, I just want to jump into it headfirst and see where it takes me. I don’t want to disappoint my family. But at the same time, I wish I could relinquish all these shackles off of me and just go do as I like without worrying about what everyone else will think of me.

I grew up with ‘horror stories’ of people my age who did nothing with their degrees and ended up going back to school. It was as if they were told to me to say that ‘stumbling through your academic and professional career is failing’. When really, it’s not. I know that.

I want to be alone. I want to run away to some far off land for a while with no expectations but the ones I have set for myself. Not the ones deemed by the environment I was raised in.

But I’m so afraid to be alone. To burn bridges wherever I go. To wander forever solo. I want love and support like any other human being on this planet. But I long to be alone because I’m afraid of being rejected.

I am at war with myself.

12/21/12

Like Alice.

So it has been just over 3 weeks since I have returned back home to Vancouver. I still wake up each morning in a sort of daze, as if I’m still not sure where I am this time around.  It’s as if I got up and was whisked away down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, and in true Alice-fashion, I woke up from dreaming. Except it’s not. The last 10 months really did happen. All I have to do is stare at the tattoo on my left foot and up at all the photos of my adventures abroad pasted on my bedroom wall to confirm it. Wonderland was a real place.

But as all adventures go, coming back home is the most difficult part of the journey. It certainly was for me. It took me a while to stop walking around the streets I knew well in a sort of strange awe; I half-expected someone to greet me in Norwegian or an Indian cow to pass me on the sidewalk. My bed felt like a nostalgic yet foreign marshmallow to sleep compared to the dorm and hostel beds I was now used to. It’s a sort of paradox, really: everything feels familiar but it’s not.

But reverse culture shock aside, it was seeing old faces that caused me the most distress. I didn’t know what to say when they asked me where I had been.

“So where have you been all this time?”

Sixteen countries. “…A lot of places.”

“Oh wow, which was your favourite place?”

In what way? “I don’t really know right now.”

“Are you happy that you’re back?”

Yes and no. “I’m not sure.”

Really, I didn’t know what to say. How could I talk about my trip without seeming like I was bragging? How could I talk about the stories I had – of which I could talk about for hours – to people at work where small talk was more appropriate? There was only so much I could say before the polite nodding would make me understand that there was no real way to bridge a gap between someone who just had not been there with me. Who weren’t completely interested because they had their own busy lives to live. There would always be things left unsaid.

For a long time, I struggled with that. I began to jokingly think that maybe I had just dreamed the whole thing. It’s a bit better now – my family and a few friends are quite understanding. But there’s only so much we can talk about my year. More often than not, the conversation always drifts back to the present and future.

The last 3 weeks for me have been a period of transition. I left Canada in January 2012 in order to step outside the small bubble called my life. Now that I’ve returned, I find myself in inside the thin membrane between these two worlds: my old life at home and the world outside.

But if I’ve realized anything this year, it’s that I can’t go back inside the bubble. I have to pop it. Travelling abroad – studying in Norway, backpacking Europe, and working in India – this has been my life for the past year. The extent of impact these experiences have had on me as a person are not crystal clear yet, but I do know that I have been shaped by them. I can’t discount them because I have trouble talking about these experiences with others. 2013 is fast approaching and with it comes my final semester at UBC. It’s the next chapter in this journey I call my life. And that’s what I’m choosing to see it as: a journey. Another destination. Another adventure.

See Vancouver is not in a bubble for me any more. The places I’ve been have shown me how to explore and Vancouver is no different. It is local but ultimately part of the global that I’ve only grazed the surface on. I want to see this city of mine with the eyes of a traveller. To marvel at all of the exquisite qualities it has to offer me. This semester, I’m discovering Vancouver.

Somehow, by still identifying myself as a traveller, my anxieties have been eased. The magic of the Wonderland I’ve discovered are waiting to be found here in this new place.

Down the rabbit hole I go again.

10/7/12

Trials & Revelations in the Field

Field Work is a whole different terrain… even more so in an entirely foreign country where you are considered an alien. It’s been around 3-4 weeks since I have arrived to work at Seva Mandir, a local Indian NGO based in the district of Udaipur. I arrived (as always) bright-eyed, ready to take on whatever challenges would await me during the next 2.5 months. 4 weeks later and I wonder if I’ve even begun.

Here’s the thing about doing field work in an NGO: no one arranges anything for you. You’re on your own. It’s the real deal. Do with it what you will. I thought I had known about this reality long before arriving in my new internship. I really did. It’s only now that I have realized that although I was fully aware of working dynamic at Seva Mandir, I hadn’t really accepted it. I was still stuck in that academic setting where I had so comfortably settled in the last 16 years. In school, you do your homework, study for your tests, get good grades and eventually get praised for all of your hard work. Classes start at 8 and end at 3. There’s a structure to your day. Here in India, I’ve been thrown into the polar opposite. I never have a structured 9 to 5 day – I could be up at 7 in the morning one day and sleep in until 10am another day. There are no set deadlines – except perhaps the looming departure date back home on the other side of the world. No one gives you a set assignment or test. As for praise – you go without. You learn to motivate yourself without reassurance from anyone else.

In short, even 10 years in university could never have prepared me for any of this.

Let me back up and explain just what I’m doing here at Seva Mandir. I’m currently working in the Education Department looking at the NGO’s Youth Resource Center (YRC) program. These YRCs are placed in villages all over the Udaipur district, with the main goal of ‘youth empowerment’ at its core mandate. YRC Facilitators at each YRC organize various activities, discussions, and training programs to teach youth about important government policies, provide a space to talk about social issues, and provide youth with vocational skills in order to better sustain their livelihoods. Such a program aims to shape youth as confident, responsible citizens for future generations. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In reality, many YRCs are popularly seen as Youth Recreation Centers – attracting small children rather than the large 14-25 age group.

So why isn’t the program working? Many studies and evaluations were conducted, which revealed that there is a clear lack of structure in the YRC program, which makes it difficult to manage and coordinate the countless number of stakeholders involved with YRCs. Hence the main message is often lost and everyone pretty much does whatever they see fit without any effective results. This is when I come in. My goal is to formulate a study to design an effective monitoring and mentoring system between all of the program stakeholders. Basically, create a backbone for the YRCs. It’s a big job, let me tell you.

So I did what I could. I thought long and hard about my research design. I thought about what I would have to do to get the data from the field. I made a plan and countless interview guidelines for all of the stakeholders I would speak with.

Now, I have a Reporting Officer. He’s pretty much my go-to person for this entire project. He’s the current YRC Coordinator and very much dedicated to his work. He even helped all of the interns in getting oriented in Udaipur in his free time. So I go to him and show him everything I have designed and get a thumbs up. Cool. We discuss the arrangements for getting interviews and focus group discussions going in the villages.

And then I wait. And I keep waiting.

Responses from villages are slow. I can’t actually speak with anyone directly because I don’t know Hindi. So I rely on my Reporting Officer and he makes some calls. Any trips I go on are usually arranged by him. But things are still slow and a week or two goes by. The lack of quality translators that can work with me for interviews are frustrating and it takes me a good week to get used to calling potential translators, conducting interviews together as a team, and actually getting some quality data. It’s basically a huge learning process.

Today, I returned from the field with my Reporting Officer, with only one out of three interviews done for the day. Since I hadn’t been feeling well, we had to postpone the discussion to my dismay. So on the way back to Udaipur City, I thought I would have to go back to playing the waiting game when my Reporting Officer asked me what my plans were for tomorrow (Monday). I shrugged and told him I would type up some field notes and wait. Immediately, he made very constructive suggestions for me to take on for the week. Visit the villages you haven’t gone to speak with the YRC Facilitators directly. Go to a village every single day. Get them to understand the importance of your study to the YRC program and have them arrange interview dates for you.

I told him that I couldn’t speak with most of the stakeholders and that I needed help.

He told me get a translator and also added that I should have worked with a translator to make phone calls on my own.

I had to blink. I had not thought to do that. The phone calls, anyway. I never once thought I could take the project into my own hands like that. Faced with the giant language barrier, I had accepted that I had to get a green light from the people around me to get anything done.

Thinking on it now – why? Why didn’t I do exactly as my Reporting Officer said? More importantly, why hadn’t I taken the initiative to think of the solution on my own? I realized on the ride home that I had somehow made myself believe that I couldn’t do anything in such a foreign environment. I had hesitated and resigned to doing really nothing for a good 2 weeks. This wasn’t the ‘me’ that got shit done back home. And by straying from my usual determination, I felt like I had let my Reporting Officer down. See, it’s not his job to tell me exactly what to do. The reason he called me into conducting this study was to get an objective perspective on the YRC Program. This, as the YRC Coordinator, he could not do. In this respect, I was a colleague rather than a subordinate. For me subconsciously, I saw my Reporting Officer as my teacher rather than my mentor. I was writing notes and staring at the blackboard instead of taking the initiative to see him as an advisor to see now and again as I conducted my own study. Instead of asking him to arrange interviews for me, I should have been asking how I could arrange the interviews myself.

So 4 weeks in, and I’ve had a revelation. Enough playing at the drawing board. I want to show my Reporting Officer that he picked the right person for this enormous task. Seven weeks left. Eight villages and numerous stakeholders to speak with. I’ve barely begun. It’s time to hit the ground running.

 

09/5/12

Colour My World.

It hit me just now: the realization that I live in two different worlds.

First is the world I currently live in. Here, my current home is in India. In this country, I wear Ali Baba pants, hop on and off auto rickshaws daily, and brave places that cannot even be called ‘toilets’.  I haggle for everything and bobble my head.  I walk the crowded streets of Jaipur, with a cow passing me every so often so nonchalantly. This is my day-to-day life at present, but in this surreal world, I’m never still. India is only my current stop. This is a world where I’m travelling constantly to new and wondrous places. Meeting new people from all over the world. Experiencing new languages and cultures. This is life I currently live.

Second is the world I left behind. The world as I knew it back in Vancouver, Canada. Where I grew up. Went to school. Had friends, family, and a job that I loved. Sometimes, I close my eyes and try to remember a regular day for me in that world: I slam the snooze on my alarm and groggily shoo my dog out of my bed as I get ready for school. Here I wear jeans, a nice scarf and pea coat, paired off with a pair of black boots. Standard UBC fashion. I race other transiting students out of the skytrain, down the escalator to get first in line to the direct bus to my school campus every morning and hit a couple z’s on the bus ride there. I hurry to my classes, maybe see a friend during break. On weekends I drive to work. I have a permanent layer of chlorine on my skin. Sometimes I walk. Go for a run in the rain. Tumblr. Cram for midterms.

You know, after reminiscing a normal day for me in my world from a year ago, I’m not so sure which one is more surreal – the one then or this current world of mine. There are a lot of spaces in that old world of mine where I have a ton of time I just spent… procrastinating. Daydreaming about this world now. Even though I have a lot more free time abroad (that’s with my fair share of lazy days too), it feels… fuller. That old world is just a flash of events that don’t seem to interlink – as if I was really dreaming that old life and flashing through the mundane bits. There are definitely parts about it that I miss. But more so than that, there is so much more that I want to bring into that old world of mine from this current one. Every day I spend in India is so full of colour (quite literally – the women here wear the brightest scarves and saris) and when I think back to Canada, everything I remember is in hues of grey and blue. Did I really spend all that time cooped in my room? Why didn’t I go out more? Make use of my time? Get to know my own city?

I often think about the day I return to Canada. November 28th. I wonder how I will feel. How I will see the city. My job. My school. My home. There’s a part of me that’s afraid to go back to that old world – afraid that all of the colour I’ve soaked in this year will fade away with the Vancouver rain. I’m afraid that I will find everything the same as I left it.

I don’t want to see it that way. I feel right now, these are two different worlds that belong to me, but they are very much detached from each other. No one in Canada can really know the people I’ve met or the things I’ve experienced out here just like my friends here haven’t a clue about my life back at home. I’m afraid that when I go back, I’ll feel so detached from that world after experiencing this one.

If that old world is in a protective bubble, I stepped out into this new world eight months ago. I don’t want to just go back inside. I want to pop the bubble. I want the colours of this world to seep into my old one. I want my worlds to merge.

So I hope that when I fly back to Canada, I will see everything with new eyes – as Vancouver is only the latest destination in my travels. A new colour in my life.