Sunday Reflections

Because Sunday is my default day-off, rather than write about if I slept-in or read a book or visited with my grandparents or baked some bread (all of which I did today), I think it is more appropriate to take this opportunity to reflect on the events of the week; consider what I learned, conversations I've had, thoughts I've been pondering.

This week brought with it my actually leaving my first-ever full time job, the decision to shift my view of the farm as a business rather than just my home, and several conversations with friends about these new happenings.  In one of these conversations, a friend posed the question of whether or not a person can truly change and grow in the context of their comfort zone.  Am I in an actual environment conducive to evaluating what I want from life because of the set structure this particular environment is defined by?  My immediate reaction to this question (and the one I used to conduct the remainder of this conversation) was to prickle and become incessantly defensive.  Yet I cannot deny the validity of the question.  On the very basic level, I would have to agree with my friend's doubts.  After all, the "comfort zone" is called such for a reason.  It is an environment in which we feel secure because we understand the boundaries and what the expectations within those boundaries are.  I would say that if a person never left their comfort zone, then, no, they would not be able to truly change and grow within it.  This, however, does not apply to my own life.  For one thing, the very fact I went to college ensured that I left my very comfortable rural existence.  My selection of Knox made that reality all the clearer.  Despite it being only forty miles from home, Knox may as well have been 4,000 miles considering the experiences I had, the people I met, and the perspectives I encountered there.  I found myself in a new political climate, an academic setting in which the majority of students WANTED to be there and to excel, living with people of differing racial, cultural, religious, and social backgrounds, and experienced the first real challenge to my identity.  I found myself questioning who I was, where I had been, where I wanted to go.  Ambitions that had never crossed my mind came to full fruition while taking the history classes and finding a supportive and encouraging mentor.

Knox gave me an opportunity to study off-campus in Chicago at the Newberry Library.  My desire to study in that program brought challenges to overcome.  For the first time in my life, I had to convince my parents I was capable of doing something.  For the first time in my life, I had to reassure my parents.  Their fear of letting go and their feeling of helplessness of my going into a situation that they couldn't advise me on stirred in me a compassion yet determination to seize this opportunity and prove to everyone that I could survive in a city.  No one needed more convincing of that fact than me.  As a junior with very little research and writing experience, I found myself in a vigorous program that left me feeling lost and uncertain about all of my abilities.  Yet because of my pride, stubbornness, and fear, I rarely expressed those concerns to parents for fear that they would want me to come home.  I found myself depending on my friend group too much to just survive the program.  But I did.  I came back to finish the year at Knox with a whole new prospective on academics.  Nothing junior year was as academically difficult as my semester at the Newberry.  Other challenges presented themselves in my daily life that forced me to undertake new methods of dealing with emotional and social situations.  Suddenly, my maternal and compassionate caring for my friends became too much to handle and I became emotionally numb.  I began to put myself and my needs before those of others.  This led me to apply for the Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship Program in Deerfield, MA.

My summer at Historic Deerfield was one of many firsts.  It was the first time I had left the Midwest, the first time I had taken an airplane, first time I ever swam in a river, the first time I saw and touched the ocean, the first time I had ever eaten Greek, Thai, Ethopian, or Middle Eastern food, and the first time I had ever met people with the same ambitions in public history as me.  It was also the first time I had actually felt like a college student.  Here, in this place thousands of miles from home with people I had just met, I felt more secure and supported to act like a twenty-year-old than I ever had at Knox.  No one expected me to act like a mother, no one judged me for never experiencing half the things I hadn't and everyone of them encouraged me in these new experiences.  If any of the other five fellows found out I hadn't done this or that, they found a way to make it happen.  And though every one of them knew I was a farm kid, they saw me first as a fellow history nerd who aspired to be a museum professional.  In fact, while hosting a speaker for an annual lecture series held at Deerfield, the gentleman (who also happened to be from the Midwest) and I were casually talking of my rural roots and he told me how I was quite worldly.  He might never have guessed I was from rural Illinois had I not told him so.  That was probably one of the biggest shocks of my life.  It had always seemed to me that because my rural background had always set me apart it must have been written on my face, in my voice, in my mannerisms.  (This separation was present even in my rural public school because so few kids were actually "farm kids." After all, here are kids who live on farms and there are "farm kids;" I am certainly one of the latter.)  My two months at Deerfield left me with a new-found confidence in life.  After all, I had survived, thrived in fact, during this summer of firsts.  I experienced a whole new part of the country with an entirely different cultural identity and met peers with whom I could act my age easily and comfortably.  This was also the first time I had ever been away from home during hay-making, a task that was as part of my summer routines since I was old enough to push a bale off the back of the hay rack.  It was one of those activities that the entire family participated in.  It built up a strength and a pride - strength of our family ties and pride in our entire family's role in keeping the farm prosperous.  Yet despite my distance from this activity, I was happy, healthy, and at peace.

A peace that the strains of senior years abruptly brought to an end.  Between my honors project and the stress of everyday college existence, I once again found myself floundering to survive.  Because my experiences in Chicago and Deerfield had brought enough diverse perspectives to my consciousness and built up enough confidence to assert myself and my own needs, I felt challenges I had never suspected I would encounter.  The result was emotional turmoil and academic self-doubt.  How I managed to actually receive honors and a Bachelor of Arts from such a prestigious institution as Knox still sometimes amazes me.  Yet, I managed both while gaining many painful, yet necessary experiences for my personal growth.  I met people who changed my life forever.  Some are still active participants in my life while others are not.  While still others have become active participants without my ever expecting them to.

The months after graduation found me working in temporary positions around campus, offering me the opportunity to learn a different side of Knox and making new friends on a professional level.  It found me applying for an internship with Tillers International, an internship I had spent months trying to talk myself out of applying for.  Yet, I did.  And I got it.  Those ten months at Tillers shifted my consciousness again, but this time in a much more intense way.  While there is no denying that the perspectives I encountered at Knox were intense, most of them dealt with professional and political aspirations and viewpoints.  It was unavoidable to discuss my rural roots and how those roots defined who I was, but no one really questioned the type of rural roots.  To most people at Knox, agriculture wasn't really a concern.  Most didn't think of it at all.  Period.  Yet at Tillers, I met a segment of people who lived agriculture, yet a wholly different kind than I was familiar with.  I met people from cities who came to Tillers because they wanted to start their own farms.  People who wanted to grow their own food in a sustainable way.  People who openly and adamantly opposed conventional farming methods.  People who forced me to defend why my family farmed the way they did.  My naturally high defenses bristled to an unknown level.  With each attack on the large, corporate, conventional farms (who I agree often have terrible practices), I felt that attack on my family because we farmed with enough similar methods that people passed judgment.  Many of these people did not see farming as a business; they envisioned bucolic homesteads on which they would grow enough food for themselves or a CSA to provide for their neighbors or a market garden for the local farmer's market.  Most never considered making their entire living by farming.  And most didn't have a clue of the work farming truly involved.  I met a woman who became a wonderful friend, yet forced me to reevaluate everything I had ever known to be certain in my life for ethical reasons.  What made the experience most difficult was her nurturing compassion for me; she asked those hard questions because she cared, not because she was judging.  And yet, I had never felt more judged in my life.  Even now, I am still considering the questions she asked, the lifestyle changes she thought I should consider, my views on what farming ought to be.  I went away from that experience once again feeling uncertain on who I was, who I ought to be, and what I wanted.

Thus brings me to my present.  Here I am, back on my family's farm.  A place of comfort.  A place that has always given me peace.  A place where I know what is expected of me.  A place that has defined me.  A place that cultivated the work ethic that I have used in every aspect of my life thus far.  And yet, over the last five years I have been exposed to a plethora of new ideas, made the acquaintance of a wide-range of people, shifted my political, social, cultural, religious, and philosophical perspective, and had my identity challenged again and again.  With each challenge I evaluate who I think I am , who I think I want to become, and struggle to find ways to succeed in those goals while remaining a genuine person.  I still struggle with the idea of self-worth yet can have such empowering experiences that I had no doubts in my abilities and what I mean to the world around me.  There is one thing that I know for certain, I am here.  I may not understand the reason, I may not know for how long, but it seems to me that I should strive to be a positive presence in the lives of those around me.  If I can manage to be a ray of sunshine, albeit a small one, in the lives of others, then everything will fall into place in its own time.

So, to answer my friend's question:  can a person truly grow and mature in their comfort zone?  When that someone brings new ideas into that zone and is willing to give those ideas freedom in order to test the existing boundaries, then, yes, they absolutely can.