Re-Entry's a Bitch

It's been almost a week since I returned from my trip to China with the class. Aside from the usual battles upon returning (re-acclimation to the time zone, food, and hectic pace of family life), I've been increasingly unsettled about things that, until this morning, had baffled me. It has to be more than sleep deprivation, I told myself, and this morning in the shower (where so many insights dwell), I finally received the clarity I had been seeking.

First off, it's lousy being back. Sure, I complained last week how much I wanted to get home, how tired I was of eating dim sum and not being able to drink the tap water, and how I was weary of living out of a suitcase. But it was still travel, and I am a traveler at heart. Now that I'm back home, the only thing I want to do is whisk my family back to all the great places I visited (OK, maybe not Guangzhou unless it's after the rainy season) and show them all the amazing things I saw. This feeling is made all the more intense by the fact that almost half my class is still in Asia on many exciting adventures, and every day I see their photos posted to Facebook and other sites, and I think to myself, "I should have extended too." Even though I'm sure that, had I done so, I would be complaining now about the heat or about having to lug 50 pounds of formalwear into the heart of China or Thailand. It's an odd feeling, this schism that has occurred in our class with half of us back home and already complaining about the routines of work life and with the other half of our class still posting pictures from paradise. Eventually they will come home, I keep telling myself, though their photos still look pretty darn spectacular. Another time.

Second, so much mental energy was invested in simply surviving until China-- for almost 20 months, this is what many of us have held up as the mile marker during the darkest times. "If I can just make it to China," many of us have told ourselves, "it will be worth it." Now not only have we made it to China, we've come back. What next? What are we supposed to use as motivation now?

This second point feeds into the third: this wild, crazy, maddening, mind-expanding, wonderful journey of graduate education is rapidly coming to an end. We have just one more class together, April 24, and even that isn't a typical class day because it will consist solely of team presentations. Sometimes I feel like this whole experience went from 100 miles per hour to zero in the space of a few days. Nobody told me it was going to decelerate so quickly. I've written here before about the nagging fears of not having the forced discipline of team projects or looming class deadlines to keep me focused; now I wonder if I've really changed enough of the dusty synapses in my brain to really sustain anything close to my current level of productivity. And what about all the people in class? Part of the magic of this program has been learning from the diverse experiences of so many smart people. In my daily business routine, I don't encounter anywhere close to this diversity of people (though I am fortunate to work with extremely smart people)-- what to do upon departing the company of so many new friends and classmates? We talk about reunions but time will tell how much of that actually transpires. Personally, I hope we do continue to meet at the Corner Bar or some similarly grand locale.

Lastly, I am haunted by all the opportunity I sensed two weeks ago and which I can even now sense fading into the routine of everyday work life. Many of my classmates enjoyed their visit to Asia, still others couldn't wait to get home, and I looked at everything there as a potential job opportunity. "I want to move my family to this country and live here-- how can I make that happen?" was my frame of reference for everything I saw and experienced. That's putting a lot of pressure on yourself, and now that I'm home and have told all my fantastic stories to my family, I think they are ready to move today. Back in the States, though, I'm struggling to keep up my connections and find the time to do new research (jobs, benefits, apartments, cities, expat options, etc.).

All of this will sort itself out, I know. Perhaps what I need to set about doing once I walk across that graduation stage is to attack the expat relocation opportunity with the same rigor as I gave to my studies. If I can do that, we may yet get to live out some of the dreams I saw as possibilities last week. The good thing, at least, is that I have all those places in my mind now as possibilities.