Since many of you
never knew me in the first eighteen years of my existence, I’m going to make
one of the more blatant understatements I’ve made on this blog: I was a big
youth group kid going up. My youth group, NFTY (pronounced “nifty”) dominated
my high school experience—almost all of my extracurricular activities went to
some facet of NFTY life, my closest friends were all in the youth group with
me, and the nineteen NFTY regions quickly supplanted the 50 states as my way of
dividing and categorizing this great nation. One of the things that NFTY did
really well was saying goodbye, partly because it’s a Jewish organization and
Jews like to linger
in others’ company and partly because it’s a youth organization and
teenagers use long, drawn-out goodbyes to reinforce the genuineness of their
friendships in the all-too-fake world of high school. At least half an hour on
the last day of every event was dedicated to the rather kitschy “friendship
circle,” where we would all offer reflections on the event and talk about
people we’d miss, and it took another half an hour for everyone to say goodbye
to those who lived in different cities and meander onto the buses. As for me, I
would make a plan of the people to whom I would say goodbye, ordering it so
that my best friends came last and I could act like the only thing that parted
us was the incessant prodding of my youth group advisor. In those exchanges, I
would hug and (if I had found romance) kiss the other person, share some of our
favorite memories from the event, talk about how much I’ll miss them, and then
hug and/or kiss again. As I would get on the bus, I invariably felt content,
enveloped in the love of my friends, if not a bit sad that the event had ended.
I still remember some of those goodbye exchanges as some of the most tender,
empowering moments of my high school experience.
For better or
worse, my goodbyes have become a little more mundane since I started college.
As I became more sure of myself, I grew to realize that the depth of a
friendship can’t be measured by the length of a goodbye, and I think my friends
have as well. Yet I think I’m still a bit haunted by the nonchalant goodbyes I
gave to the people on my program, and to London itself. After classes ended,
everyone started to trickle out of the city to catch flights back home, meet
family, or do more traveling. Amidst packing and planning travels, and given
that all but one person the program will be back in Chapel Hill next fall,
saying goodbye became more of a rushed sideshow than anything else. Why waste
the time to say goodbye to someone when I know I’ll see them again within a few
months? Why say goodbye to a city that I was going to fly out of in a few weeks
anyway?
Returning home
from living in another community can always be disorienting, whether we return
from university life, another continent, or even a youth group event. In making
our journeys, we uproot ourselves from our home culture and shred others’
expectations of us, our comfort zones, our fears, and eventually our own
expectations of ourselves. We forge new personalities when we venture to new
places—the Jonathan of Jacksonville is different than the Jonathan of Chapel
Hill, and those Jonathans are markedly different from the Jonathan of London,
who is perhaps a bit different from the Jonathan of Aix-en-Provence or
Amsterdam. Yet it’s not just that we develop different personalities in new
situations, we allow those new personalities and expectations to interact with
and to mold each other. In short, we change. My thoughts on music, labor
movements, travel, packing for travel, risk-taking, my own privilege, and the
tastiness of certain types of vegetables have changed pretty substantially from
my thoughts on those topics five months ago. Yet when I return home, I’m
confronted with a community that knows that
I’ve changed, but for simplicity’s sake is forced to assume that they’re
talking to the Jonathan that left for London five months ago. (I remember my
mother’s shock when I didn’t pick all of the mushrooms out of a dinner dish.) For
my first couple weeks in Jacksonville, I found myself in a funk because I
couldn’t quite navigate the path between the London version of myself, the old
Jacksonville version, the version shaped by my parents’ and friends’
perceptions of me, and whatever I wanted the new Jacksonville version to be. I
couldn’t quite pin it down at the time, but I was having a mini-identity
crisis—Jacksonville felt safe and fun, but
For all of its
idiosyncrasies, my youth group understood that the NFTY versions of ourselves
were different than the home versions of ourselves (to this day, I am called
“Jonny” by my NFTY friends and “Jon” or “Jonathan” by everyone else). NFTY
understood that we could only move back to our homes once we spent time saying
goodbye to these “other” versions of ourselves and the people and places that
made up those other versions. In my race to distance myself from my high school
affects, I forgot about this nugget of wisdom. I made sure to cram all the
travel and sightseeing I could into my time in Europe, but I never took the
time to say goodbye to friends, places, and even myself. The community that
gets together for our London reunion this fall will be different than the one
that stayed in Bloomsbury a couple months ago, not because it will be comprised
of different people but because the people who comprise it will have changed. I
assumed that I’d see my friends from London again, but I realize now that I
won’t see them in quite the same light. And I’ll never see myself in quite the
same light, either. Am I sad about that? Not really. But I should have mustered
a goodbye to my European way of thinking.
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| Hyde Park. |
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| Tower Bridge at night. |
