Casi Estoy

Over 2 years in Ecuador. Very little time to go. Excitement building. Updates lacking.

I would like to share some unfinished blog entries that I started to write but I felt were fully capable of being a blog entry on their own. They are somewhat random, but they show some different, weird thoughts that have passed through my mind in the time I have been here.

Bastards
There are honest, decent human beings out there. Everywhere. It really is not too hard to find the good ones. No matter what one- and quite possibly several- person appreciates the work you are doing. Work may be something seemingly trivial or insignificant, but people do appreciate it. In my case, I have a handful of people who are truly grateful for what I have been doing here. Those decent souls are not my problem; the negative individuals seem to be. For every positive person or compliment I receive, the indecency and idiocy of the one person seems to trump all the good.

Personal growth
Is it possible to measure one's own growth as a human being? Sure, there have been many experiences here to shape and change me, but I feel as though I am still the same person as when I started. Reading old entries of blogs and other letters, I do realize that I have learned a great deal while here in Ecuador. I cannot say definitively if I am a different person than when I started. I would like to believe that I have grown, but I guess I will need the opinions of others to formulate the correct answer.

Life and Decisions
It is easy to think of our lives as a straight line. Point A to Point B. A being birth. B being death. The line encompasses all events, significant or not. For some people the line may not seem straight. It may feel like a twisting road, not seeing the one event around the bend. For me life is a reversed NCAA bracket. Birth starts at the championship game. One line. Working backwards from there, we hit a fork in the road. The fork is Decision 1, Decision 2, up to Decision N. What we choose from this set of decisions starts us down a new path. These splits and separate paths fill me with several questions. What is along that other path? Did I choose the right decision at this or that fork? What events in my life have been those splitting moments on my timeline?