Truthful Observations About Returning Stateside

Since returning home on Wednesday night after almost 24 hours of traveling, I've noticed a few things about my home country that I failed to remember when I left. My eyes feel fresher to this country's nuances:

The roads seem bigger and there is more ambient space for grass and trees amid the more-sprawling-than-England's suburbs. People are friendlier. Eye contact and lots of hellos. Cars, lots of them, along the road, startle me more, even though I noticed that overall Americans drive more cautiously than many British people. Big box stores, very few independent shops in the suburbs.

But then again...

I moved from a small city (York) back to a fairly large urban-suburban area (Towson/Baltimore). That's different from moving from a suburb to a suburb, or the countryside to rural America. These observations about my one home in comparison with my other home feel accurate, but they're just my sense.

All that makes me think: how much of what we think we experience as "truth" is actually our personal lens on the world?

This morning, for example, I went back to my home church for the first time in over a year. Ascension Lutheran is the church where my entire family has attended for well over two decades. Krissy works there part-time (in addition to teaching) and they were really supportive during my YAGM year abroad.

It was like sinking into a warm bath. After a year of struggling to like the church where I worked, St. Columba's, on an institutional level, it felt so good to return to the familiar. In its familiarity was beauty. The same people I sadly said goodbye to a year ago all gave me hugs and excited greetings. My jaw hurt from talking so much, people kept coming up after the service to my pew to say hello, and my sister and I only finally left the sanctuary when the lights got turned off.

In front of us by a couple of rows was a woman sitting by herself. She did not smile much or go out of her way to speak. A few people said hello to her. But mostly she was alone.

Last year, I never would have noticed her. I have my church crew - the families who know me, the friends who come to say hi, and of course my sister (we always sit in the back so we can talk). But now I did; I went up during the sharing of the peace to shake her hand. That's because for a full year I felt lonely and alone at St. Columba's, largely unnoticed, and I also watched how the church at large struggled to make anyone new feel welcome or appreciated (or even, for that matter, some members who had been there for ages who did not fit in).

Who and what else am I not noticing because I have not seen enough? It took a year away to realize just how much slips through my grasp. When I first arrived in England, I felt like a silent sponge. I didn't talk much but I noticed everything. Double yellow lines on the side of the road, new words, prices in pounds, different systems at grocery store check-outs, fascinating medieval and tudor-style buildings, street signs nailed to the sides of buildings instead of on posts, a nine-hundred year old church around the corner from my house, a community garden on a plot of land that used to be an ancient cemetary. All new, all noticed.

But that was my England experience. Those were the quirks that stuck out to me. Maybe someone else would say that's not the England they know and love. Maybe they noticed entirely different things about their England. Their truth of the place would be different.

Our truths come through our own personal lens. It's humbling and vitally important that we remember how narrow that lens really is, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. An acknowledged filter is a good start to grow and it's also inevitable, really. But the fact that we all see things our way, from the seat of our own experiences and our own backgrounds - that's indisputable. That is the truth.

The Medium Chill

Welcome!

If you're here, thanks for reading! This blog is the co-creation of four people: Krissy, Tommy, Shantonu, and Katie. More about us later.

We're four (related) people in our mid-twenties to mid-thirties, all of whom like to create, invent, and write. Naturally this led us to the idea of a blog.

We were kicking around themes for this nascent creation, something to build a whole project around, and the same ideas kept cropping up:

• saying YES to living rather than just spending money/existing/being boring
• gratitude and appreciation for what we have
• being interested in our lives rather than comparison with people around us

Then we found this fabulous article: The Medium Chill by David Roberts. And his revisit a few years later, The Medium Chill Revisited. Fabulous! A good start. We liked the name Medium Chill.

What even is Medium Chill?

Well, it's actually a few things. Psychologists use the term to describe building a firm protective wall from toxic people in your life.

But in our context, it's different. That's a good idea but not what we're talking about here. As in the article, David Roberts says it's a lifestyle characterized by stepping out of the rat race and being happy with what you have. Yes, we agreed. That's sorta kinda what we're going for!

The best part about this blog is we're trying to put into practice what we're preaching. A medium chill lifestyle espouses prioritizing the relationships around you. Thus, notice the "we" that "we" write of; that's because this blog will be co-authored by four people. We're related. I'm one of the sisters. The other is Krissy. Then there's her husband, Furman, also known as Tommy. And there's my fiance (newly!), Shantonu. Here's a great way of medium chilling - writing together, creating together. Being inventors, pioneers, artists together.

Naturally, we're four people so we think different things. How I live my life is different than my co-authors here. That's good. More options. So that phrase you always see - all views and opinions expressed are entirely my own - is really true here. Things might like different from writer to writer.

But the goal of this blog is the same: to document how we say YES to opportunities for living. Getting and staying excited about life. Being invested in relationships and communities. Being grateful. Medium chilling - working hard for the things that matter, and letting go and just living the rest.

Thanks for joining us!

Katie, Shantonu, Krissy, Tommy