June 4th. That's the day life as I know it will be turned on end.
I suppose I'm fortunate. A lot of people have no idea when their lives will change drastically. Of course, something unexpected may happen in the two weeks between today and June 4th, but barring that, I have the opportunity to be prepared to have my perspective on life comepletely and unalterably skewed.
June 4th is the day I leave my cozy life in Minnesota. I fly into Los Angeles for my Peace Corps staging event.
Oddly, I'm more nervous about this than about living in a foreign country for two years, and I've pondered why. I have to find my way from LAX to the Downtown Sheraton all by myself, and though they give me directions to a free shuttle to the hotel, I still find myself nervous. Maybe because I expect to make a fool of myself in Kiribati, and not in L.A. Maybe because I've had more time to work out how it will be in Kiribati, and I've just learned that the staging event will be in L.A. within the past two weeks. Maybe because I have no idea what life will be like in Kiribati, so I have nothing to compare it to in my head while I have a pretty clear idea of what L.A. is like, and it's taken up more room in my head...maybe I'm rambling.
"Dude, you're going to live in a culture where you don't even speak the language for two years and you're getting nervous about an airport? Amazing." That was my friend Nels's reaction when I told him my biggest concern thus far. There's a coping strategy in our Peace Corps Handbook that says we should focus all of our anxieties into one thing rather than all the differences we'll find between cultures. In an email, one of the folks I'll be heading out with confessed that they were putting all their fears into scorpions, imagining that either they'll be the size of dogs or that there will be so many of them that the ground will look like it's moving. Maybe, subconsciously, that's what I'm doing about my flight to L.A.
I'm one of those people who are chronically unprepared. I put things off to the very last minute, always, and of course I sometimes come out holding the short end of the stick. But I don't really care. Most important things take care of themselves and the worry is much more worrisome than the actual "problem." So, maybe just this once, I'll be that guy who's prepared for his journey, I'll have everything planned in advanced, I'll make sure what I want to have packed in my carry-on and what I'll need to have with me in Kiribati and I'll know every step I'll take to get from one place to another. Maybe this experience will be the one that changes my outlook on life from "rolling with the punches" to "stopping the punches before they come".
But probably not.