Summing it all up

The countertops are shorter. When people would ask how it felt to be home, back in the “real” world, I wanted to tell them just that. The countertops are shorter. That’s all I was sure about as I returned to the life I had left behind for a semester. Except they aren’t any shorter. They haven’t changed since the house was built. Turns out, it was I who grew two inches in four months; it turns out, a semester of mountain air and adventure transforms. But until I had old countertops to stand next to and the shell of my past to try and fit in, I had no idea.

A friend, much wiser and concise than I, said a while ago, “Most of what HMI taught me, I have learned after leaving”. I would rephrase that and say coming home is a bit like being hit by a truck and having to learn how to walk again. Then being hit by another truck. One expects the inevitable change during the adventure, but the realization and requirement of change triggered by the act of returning is a semi barreling in and disrupting one’s very definition of self. Two lives must be reconciled, two worlds must be mastered. It’s the failures and successes of the return home that demonstrate what was learned while away, thus coming home becomes a process of cementing past experiences into knowledge and values, necessitating that we are active participants in the “learning after leaving”. Yet, each time I thought I had picked up the pieces of who I am and figured out how to change, I would be standing next to my kitchen counters, or sitting in math class, or singing in the car when a Florence and the Machine song played on the radio, and little realizations of what had been lost in the shuffle of leaving and returning would hit me like trains, taxi cabs and trash trucks.

And so I did what every person who has been run over by a metaphorical truck of loss should do: I read a bunch of Tennyson. And read, and read, and re-read to the point of memorization. “Ulysses” became a bedtime story, an anthem, a prayer. I read of Ulysses’ return home after battling in Troy, and his struggle to combine what he left at home ten years before with his adventures away and the life that he has returned to. And as I read, I clamored to define for myself my change after the adventure, my reconciliation of the return home.

The first epiphany of change upon returning, other than my height difference, was that I did not actually return to the same home I left. At first I read Tennyson’s opening lines with criticism for his shallow focus and non-existent attempt at returning home.:
“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me” (Ulysses)
Ulysses words are harsh as he returns home, but during those first few weeks after I returned my thoughts mirrored Tennyson’s upon each realization of how friends had changed or what I was now expected to have fun doing. I had changed during my semester away, but I also returned to a world that had aged and transformed as well. They “knew not me” but I didn’t know who I was returning to either. Morgan Hite in his essay aptly named “After the Adventure” disagrees with my last point by saying “their world did not move in the short time that I have been gone forever” (Hite). But of course it did, because change is constant. Ulysses came home to an aged wife, but the thing is, she experienced the change of ageing gradually. To the adventurer these slow subtle shifts compound into earthquakes upon the return. Change comprehended at a steady pace does not feel like change, but to those who have “been gone forever”, the should-be-smooth growth looks pretty huge. It is this change, and the blindness of others to it, not the lack of transformation, that adds to the difficulty of coming home. In the song “Ghosts” by The Head and The Heart, the lyrics ask “it any wonder why we all leave home? /People say, "I knew you when you were six years old"/And you say, ‘But I've changed, I've changed, I've changed, I've changed’”(The Head) the people I’ve known when they were six years old had changed, and that realization is a lot to handle when I was not able to even comprehend how I had transformed over the semester. The illusion of consistency that slow changes emit does not particularly welcome home those who had also transformed. Perhaps that is why in literature, adventurers seldom return home, at least for very long anyway.

Ulysses returns for a stanza, enough to lament how dull home is and become nostalgic about the sea and changing horizons. Then he places his son as ruler and invites others to leave with him again: “Come, my friends/’Tis not too late to seek a newer world” (Ulysses). And in the Poisonwood Bible, the Price family is incapable of returning home after becoming missionaries in Africa. Leah, the protagonist of the novel, greatly transforms during her first two years in Africa, falling in love with the jungle (and a boy) and refuses to go “home”. she chooses to continue the adventure, “craving…to belong somewhere”(Kingsolver 474), to find a new place to call home, and thus forever seeking adventure. At the end of “Oedipus the King”, Oedipus exiles himself from his kingdom, his home, after the discoveries on his journey towards truth. Blindly, he continues to adventure, this time physically leaving Thebes. Though, sometimes a refusal to return and the continuing of an adventure is rendered impossible by circumstance. I had to return to the community I had left, and though it had, was, and is transforming, I still had to return home instead of fleeing Thebes or remaining in the Congo. And unlike Ulysses who could seek that newer world, I had a senior year to attend.

And so I had to be hit by a truck each time I realized that I am not who I was, nor is anyone else, then I had to get on up and learn to walk again. I had to learn to love the uncomfortable feeling of rebuilding my life to fit in my “home”. I had to learn how to look at each choice I make as a continuation of the transformation that began with my semester away. Change is a choice made up of loss and gain. Coming home presents an opportunity to answer the question “what will you choose to value?” It is in answering this question that one begins to reconcile past and present and knit two lives together. Taking ownership of choices and not only accepting, but actively participating in a continuation of, a transformation prevents the change after the adventure from becoming a regression and de-valuing all that had been learned while away. It is the point where the name Ulysses has become is spoken, not forgotten (Ulysses). It is the point when there are “two options to ease the pain. The first is to actively forget. It was just an adventure. It wasn't relevant…The second is that bundle I carried in the door, the thick, tattered web of bonds with my fellows. It is not to be discarded it in a corner; it is to be used...to cement the two worlds together” (Hite). If I am required to return, I refuse to regress. This is the heroic fight, the fight to keep transforming by picking and choosing the stitches holding one world to another.

Raskalnikov, of Crime and Punishment, finally becomes extraordinary at the end as a result of a choice to change. For most of the novel, Raskolnikov's lack of deliberate action frustrates. Through his wanders on the street, the murder without a defined motive, giving away money, throwing it over the bridge, Raskolnikov has no purpose. It is when he sees what he’s gained and lost that he finds a will to live for a purpose. Ultimately, it is at the end, not when he is convinced to turn himself in by Sonya and Porfiry, but when he makes the choice to change for himself, that he utilizes the inevitable change as a constructive force to glue his future to the best aspects of his past. There is honor in deciding for oneself to embrace the change after an adventure. In another of Tennyson’s poems, “Break, Break, Break”, the speaker stands along the seashore, reminded of what he no longer has, ordering the sea to break with his heart and bring back voices and hands of those once close and forever loved (Break) The speaker takes no direct action, greatly contrasting the call “to strive, to seek, to find” of “Ulysses”. The speaker has lost, but with no actions towards gaining, he is missing an integral part of change, and thus stands stagnant. The poisonwood bible again gives inspiration to avoid idleness: “Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow” (Kingsolver 385). The speaker in “Break, Break, Break” only finds sorrow, but Ulysses, Leah, Oedipus and Raskolnikov find hope in the continuation of life’s journey of change.

The choices made after the adventure that continue the change assign value to the experience. Forgetting and moving on without looking back lessens the meaning and worth of the adventure. On the other hand, refusing to look forward lessens the potential of who one is to become as a result of the adventure. The return requires finding the balance between moving on and remembering. In Beloved, by the ghosts of her past haunt Sethe as she mourns the loss of her daughter and the life they could have had together. Sethe is afraid of losing her “best thing”, though it is long gone, and even more afraid of learning to love something else. When Amy tells Sethe that "anything dead coming back to life hurts” (Morrison 35), she’s acknowledging that it hurts to move on, it hurts to let go, but hope is a whole lot better than haunting and so she does. Denver takes that step off the porch. Sethe learns to fly again. We must surrender to life, to a new adventure, for the possibility of creating a new "best thing". It is how we continue to grow from our pasts that creates our identities and makes us whole. Tennyson also acknowledges the past’s duel importance of developing a person and preparing them to go forth: “I am part of all that I have met;/Yet all experience is an arch where through/Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades/ Forever and forever when I move” (Ulysses). By allowing ourselves to move on and seek the margin of the world untraveled we credit that past adventures with the value of creating our futures. Sometime throughout this year I have realized that I must keep looking towards the hopeful horizon in order to make my coming home not just a return but a new adventure.

And so, adventure begets adventure. The return brings to focus the value of the adventure, but the hero’s journey is a cycle, and a departure soon follows. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the prisoner comes to the conclusion that he is unable to return, asking “were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness?” (Plato) I returned unaccustomed to the pattern of life in Centennial. I missed the constant action that being surrounded with 41 friends provides in the period before sleep, or between waking up and eating breakfast. I missed the conversations and parking lot soccer games. I missed the sleep talking of my cabin mates. I was bad at the game of malls and movies, hot tub parties and wearing a different face around people I didn’t share a heart with. And while I was required to change after the adventure, shift into a new life at home; I keep my eyes looking into the light of the future, refusing to believe the shadows on the walls are all there is.

My father handed me a book one night in January, thinking I’d enjoy reading a story about Everest, and perhaps sensing my struggles over the previous semester in transitioning home. Into The Silence is the story of the first Everest expeditions made up of soldiers that did not know how to return home after the Great War. These men walked up the highest mountains on earth literally bleeding from war wounds, psychologically damaged and missing those they developed relationships with in the trenches (Davis). They looked to the peaks for the same hope of “something dead coming back to life”(Morrison) that Sethe searches for. They strapped on boots and crampons like Ulysses hops on his boat, “one equal temper of heroic hearts” (Ulysses). And I read their tale, just as I read Tennyson’s poems, to become one of those heroic hearts who are forever called to adventure.

And so this I know: I will always “roam with a hungry heart” (Ulysses). I do not know how to live any other way. I do not know how to come home. I am afraid because a life on the move means always seeking never-quite reaching contentment. The constant struggle to look forward to cope with leaving the past brings the myth of Sisyphus to mind, the infinite toil of pushing a rock up only to see it roll down and starting again. But as I imagine Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill I wonder why he does not just give up and I am reminded of my own journeys up mountains. The climb has always been my favorite part, muscles warm and working, eyes hopeful as the sky grows and the earth shrinks away, my breath catching on thin air and awe. It is the descent which brings the disappointment, marking a return to cell service and the worries forgotten during the pure living of walking upwards. It is the return where I realize the restlessness in my legs and in my heart, a yearning always “to strive, to seek and not to yield” (Ulysses). I cope with the return by dreaming of leaving again, just as Syphilis keeps rolling his rock, a fate that might seem futile, but is much better than letting my stone stand idle long enough to grow roots in a place I forgot how to call home.