Withdrawal symptoms
This morning someone held the door open for me while I was going into office building here on campus. Unbidden, the first thing that jumped into my mind was "jenquia," which is a kind of phonetic spelling for the Polish word for "thank-you." (Actually, what jumped into my head started with a D, but I have no idea how to spell it properly and at the moment I am too lazy to look it up.)
I have discovered, since getting back to the US a few days ago, that I miss Krakow. I miss the cheap but good food, I miss having the Rynek right nearby as a place to go and sit and read, I miss running down by the banks of the Visła and around the Wavel Castle (suburbs are not as pretty). But I especially miss the total immersion teaching -- the fact that for the last month I have been able to use every waking moment as a teachable example, and continue conversations in one context that began in quite another one. Everything was so compressed over the course of the month that I felt like we were able to get to a very profound level of discussion by the end; it takes much longer to get there under "normal" semester conditions. We hit the ground running and hardly stopped, but I think that helped the experience along.
The problem, of course, comes when you then have to readjust to the rhythms of everyday life in another context entirely. As Jen put it in a conversation, there is a kind of feeling that one wants to go home and show off the "new clothes" and new facets of identity that one has acquired, but there is also the gravitational pull of older social arrangements that has to be resisted in order to keep a space for that new understanding and new mode of being oneself. Combine that with the withdrawal pangs -- the sudden, inexplicable longing for a pierogi or one of those Polish bagel-things that everyone sells on the street corners -- and the whole experience of coming home is somewhat bittersweet.
Fortunately, teaching is therapy (among other things), and I suspect that later classes will be enriched by my public working-through of these issues. That's how social bounding processes work, after all: if no one acknowledges a boundary, whether explicitly or in the orientation of their meaningful actions, there is no analytical sense in identifying a boundary at all. (There may be a normative or political sense, but that's another matter.) Withdrawal is all about boundaries, about settling into some kind of habit of life that integrates various facets in such a way that they are liveable for all concerned. And at the moment I find myself in the thick of it, which is probably where I am supposed to be at the moment.
Two things that I do know: there will be a Polish case in my next book, and I will run a study abroad program like this one again in the not-too-distant future.
[Posted with ecto]
I have discovered, since getting back to the US a few days ago, that I miss Krakow. I miss the cheap but good food, I miss having the Rynek right nearby as a place to go and sit and read, I miss running down by the banks of the Visła and around the Wavel Castle (suburbs are not as pretty). But I especially miss the total immersion teaching -- the fact that for the last month I have been able to use every waking moment as a teachable example, and continue conversations in one context that began in quite another one. Everything was so compressed over the course of the month that I felt like we were able to get to a very profound level of discussion by the end; it takes much longer to get there under "normal" semester conditions. We hit the ground running and hardly stopped, but I think that helped the experience along.
The problem, of course, comes when you then have to readjust to the rhythms of everyday life in another context entirely. As Jen put it in a conversation, there is a kind of feeling that one wants to go home and show off the "new clothes" and new facets of identity that one has acquired, but there is also the gravitational pull of older social arrangements that has to be resisted in order to keep a space for that new understanding and new mode of being oneself. Combine that with the withdrawal pangs -- the sudden, inexplicable longing for a pierogi or one of those Polish bagel-things that everyone sells on the street corners -- and the whole experience of coming home is somewhat bittersweet.
Fortunately, teaching is therapy (among other things), and I suspect that later classes will be enriched by my public working-through of these issues. That's how social bounding processes work, after all: if no one acknowledges a boundary, whether explicitly or in the orientation of their meaningful actions, there is no analytical sense in identifying a boundary at all. (There may be a normative or political sense, but that's another matter.) Withdrawal is all about boundaries, about settling into some kind of habit of life that integrates various facets in such a way that they are liveable for all concerned. And at the moment I find myself in the thick of it, which is probably where I am supposed to be at the moment.
Two things that I do know: there will be a Polish case in my next book, and I will run a study abroad program like this one again in the not-too-distant future.
[Posted with ecto]
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home