Another Post

Recently while reading other’s blogs I have been challenged. As I found by reading other MCCer’s blogs, I think we all have struggles with the inconsistencies between our lives and those around us, whether with living arrangements, foods consumed, or the availability of purchasing consumer goods. I believe my fellow MCC collegues have struggled with this issue and come to the same conclusion; we are not in control nor should we attempt to control the world around us or the inconsistencies we see each day. There’s this delicate balance in the world. However, I feel I have personally just shut down instead of being challenged and invigorated to overcome these issues. And as you can see from the lack of my posting lately, I haven’t had much time to reflect.

Now I have been busy so I could blame not planning time for reflection on my hectic schedule or on constantly traveling or sharing computers in the office or being distracted by Facebook or weddings or friends visiting or ... the list could go on and on. As I look at my work here, I’m afraid I’m not very encouraged either. I was talking with WPM’s former adviser a couple weeks ago. Elijah is back in Cambodia for his wedding to Sina on Saturday. We were catching up and talking about WPM and I mentioned how I wrote as my main goal for the year is to have WPM continue to exist after 2008. Elijah nodded his head knowingly and said he often felt the same way. argh. If he felt this way two years ago and now I’m dealing with the same frustrations, is WPM ever going to find stable funding and cut down on their travel costs? Sometimes I wonder.

But I don’t always see results. And I want to! But at the same time I’m not willing to invest myself in Cambodia for a decade or longer to see those much coveted results others like Barb or Bee Nogh or Susie have seen that I haven’t. Where’s the balance? I surely can’t continue like I’ve been for the past couple of months as a sieve catching hardly anything that I am exposed to while simply watching everything else filter though. I’m getting restless again.

Have I gotten too comfortable here that I’ve desensitized myself? Or have I been living in survival mode for the past year and a half? Or is it something in between the two that I haven’t quite placed my finger on yet?

I don’t like doing something just to do it; busywork drives me nuts. I need to be working towards something that will have a tangible result for the better good as a whole. If I see myself still in when I should be moving I get extremely frustrated. Perhaps part of my problem is that I get restless when I feel like I’m just going through the motions of life. But as Gandhi reminds me “It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”