Two Weeks

It's 7:09 in the morning on a beautifully cold Saturday in Chicago. I will be leaving for O'Hare airport around this time in two weeks to go to Ecuador. (A mere two weeks! Imagine the pressure! AAAAAAHHHHHH!)

I still don't know what family I'm staying with in Cuenca. This is coming from a girl who, though random on paper and computer screen, likes to have her life semi-together. She likes to know what's going on. If she doesn't know what's going on, she at least wants to really know the people who are currently in the same boat of uncertainty that she is.

I've lived with a level of uncertainty all my life. Everyone has, I think. I just have had rather high levels over the past few years, and I have grown to love knowing what I'm doing in life--at least, in the next semester. And now I have to retrain my mind, my focus, my mindset, my entire mental program, in order to see things through an Ecuadorian mindset.

I've realized that my unconsciously westernized viewpoint is diametrically opposed to what I will find in Ecuador. In some parts of South America, it is a saying (or, at least, a mindset) that the past is before us, the future behind. That's so counter-intuitive to a person like me. I know that I can see the past (because I lived it), but I've always thought of the future as in front of me. They're right, though: you can't see the future. You can only see the past, and therefore, it is the past, not the future, that is before you.

And that, my friend, will take a bit of mind calisthenics to understand.