A little over a year ago, I landed in Rīga. It's hard to tell whether the year has gone by fast or slow; I seem to have an inbuilt tendency to deny that time passes in anything but its normal pace, but this year has, in fact, felt almost exactly as long as it has actually been. My time here has, to this point, been everything and nothing like I expected, better and harder than I ever would have dreamed.¹
I've taken some time this week to do some reflecting on the events of the past year. While enjoying a decidedly non-Latvian meal last evening,² I read through my journal entries from the past couple of years, covering the journey to and my first year in Latvia. I'm a consistently sporadic writer in my journal even in the best of times,³ so it's less of a stream of consciousness and more a series of snapshots, significant moments incompletely captured with graphite and paper.
One consistent thread seemed to wind through the assorted verbal snapshots, which was a sense of being caught in between two worlds: the world of Here, and the world of There; Here being where I am, and There being wherever I am not.
Deep, I know.
But part of the significance is that, even being where I know I'm meant to be, there is still the constant temptation to let myself feel pulled to the There. And the opposite is true, as there is the threat of ignoring the There in order to live more fully in the Here. There is a healthy tension which can exist, keeping me from either being too immersed in the Here or There, or ignorant of either locale, but the balance between the two - especially while living in a country and culture that are not your own - is a difficult one to maintain.
Perhaps the oddest realization was that as time has passed, I haven't settled deeper into either Here or There, but instead have found myself increasingly living in the proverbial "wood between the worlds." As I assimilate myself more into Latvian life and culture,⁴ I find that I'm simultaneously becoming slightly less American in the process. That is to say, as I add, I also subtract:
Every choice is filled
both with potential
and exclusion; to
grasp is also to release,
and the rising of the sun
obscures the distant glimmer
of nighttime diamonds.
The more I become whoever it is I'm becoming, the less I find myself either Here or There, but in the land in between. It's a good place to be; it's the place I'm meant to be. But while it's consistently good, it's not always easy.
Latvia just had an anniversary of its own; twenty three years since the Restoration of Independence. I've been here for one of those years; a small part of the story of this country, even in the most near-sighted, short-term sense.⁵ It's important for me to keep this sense of scale and perspective in mind as I move forward, and remind myself that as hard as I might try I can never become Latvian. And as much as I'd sometimes like, I can't remain the American I have been either. My identity is now somewhere in the middle, neither Here nor There.
Being forced to find identity outside of your location or birthplace is not always an easy thing, but it does push one to seek for something deeper, more permanent, and grounded in something more real than soil and flag and passport pictures.
Which leads me to being thankful for a Source of identity, a vine to stay connected to, which reaches out to wherever I happen to be, giving life and meaning and purpose.⁶
¹A Dickensian statement if ever there was one, but its no less true because it's been said before
²I think "hamburger and french fries and a coke" is conversely about as American as it gets. What can I say, I still need to feed my burger belly from time to time
³Apparently that habit carries over to this blog as well
⁴I'm hardly going to be mistaken for a Latvian anytime soon, but that's never been the goal. I do hope to become fluent in the language and culture at some point, but that day is still years away
⁵Latvia as a country has formally existed since 1918, but you can trace the cultural and lingual heritage back far further
⁶John 15
Freedom Monument in Rīga, on the anniversary of
Latvia's Restoration of Independence