Consuming Culture

In preparation for going abroad, I have come to reflect more and more on my time at Holden Village.  I guess it would only make sense to do so.  Both trips were St. Olaf sponsored trips.  But there is something else that keeps coming to mind.  As I am panicking about this trip, I am reminded of how seemingly little worry I had up at Holden village.  Which has led me to wonder what was so different about my time up at Holden?

I had thought at the time that most of my problems before going to Holden were sleep related. And that was fairly accurate.  When I got more sleep I went up a letter grade in three of my classes.  But now I am realizing that there was something much more profound about being there that had helped me.  What it was, I don't know.  I hope to figure it out, since a life with less worry sounds wonderful.  Well, it is something to ponder in the next couple of weeks.

In my Holden musings, I was looking back at some of my old books.  There was a couple of them about consumerism that had hit home for many of us reading it.  The idea that people had begun to wantonly consume everything around them, and that everything was for sale, no matter the impact, really hit home for me. And it is making me wonder, whether I came into this trip with the idea, that my whole goal was to consume as many cultures as I could.  My job on this trip was to shlurp up all the cultural experiences that I could, and that was it.

That thought process is not wrong, but it does seem incomplete. I am going to these countries to see all that I can see, and learn all that I can learn.  But the impact of this trip cannot just stop with me taking in the sights.  What is equally important is what I do with this experience.

So, as a good Lutheran, I must now ask, what does this mean?  I have absolutely no clue.  I feel like Holden in general brought up more questions than answers, and so does this trip.  I guess I can only hope that the answers that I need will be revealed when I need them.  But I do feel a slight bit more urgency to keep up this blog.  If nothing else, it is something that I can produce from this trip that will help me and possibly others make sense of this trip.  But enough rambling for now