Skip to main content

Saudade.

I don’t know if it’s getting closer to another change, or if it’s because we had a nice sunny day on Monday, but I am really missing Fortaleza a lot right now. I find myself frequently with tears in my eyes, remembering people I hold so close to my heart. Getting emails from people there makes me feel closer, yet also further away as an email only expresses a fragment of the whole picture. We all perceive and express and feel things differently anyway, don’t we.

When Andrew emailed to say that Lisa is close to having her baby and had spoken of me, it made me want to go there and be with her. Be with her in this important and insecure time of her young life. Be with her with encouragement and support. Be with her and show her that she is worth going the extra mile for. It brings back memories of 5 years ago getting up at the crack of dawn to take 15 year-old Rachel to the pre-natal care offered for free on Friday mornings by some Catholic nuns, and getting to go with her to get an ultrasound. Memories of being really angry and frustrated that when she was giving birth for the first time at age 15, she wasn’t allowed anyone with her. Memories of visiting her and seeing her little David only 4 hours old, and memories of James just stood by the hospital bed seeing Rachel and wee David with tears streaming down his face. Tears expressing the heart of a father (even if he wasn’t the biological father).

It is good to feel this saudade (a Portuguese word which means the concept of missing someone or something, for which there is no English equivalent). Good, because it means that I did give of myself, and that I did leave some of myself behind. Not that I ever doubted that I did, but some days I go through the day and feel kind of numb. It seems far too simple to get sucked into the Norwegian way of life. It is so easy to loose focus on what lies beyond what I can see and what the media feeds me. It is so easy to stop feeling. Yet I am grateful that I still feel. Grateful that when I think of Brazil my eyes well up with tears. Grateful that when I see people suffering on TV my heart goes out to them, and I feel a bit of the compassion and justice of God.

So 4 months down the line the saudade remains. I don’t know if it is less or more or different than when I first came back. It’s just there really. It’s hard to imagine myself doing something different, being someone different. I am who I am and what I have lived has marked me for life. And I am grateful. Grateful for having had the opportunity to share my life with the people I met, and grateful for being allowed to share their lives.

I think the saudade is going to stick around for a good while still. Maybe forever. And as I continue this journey I’m on, a journey where the aim isn’t to get to a destination, but the aim is to live, I wait in expectation for what the next stop holds.

Popular posts from this blog

Packing...again.

I just folded the last load of laundry and I’m almost packed. Off to the airport at 5am tomorrow morning, heading off to Amsterdam. I’m excited, a bit nervous, and wondering what it’ll be like. It’s been a good week at home with lots of quality time with family, especially the little nieces and nephew. I’m glad I’ll see them in April again. Well, not much to write and packing to be done and a bit of sleep would probably be a good idea too. Next time I write it’ll be from Amsterdam....

Single-tasking September: The art of single-tasking.

To change habits and ways of life, the motivation for change has to be strong, and the benefits outweigh the effort it takes to make the change.  For so long it’s seemed like the ability to multitask has been regarded as a great skill, but is it really a good thing? Recovering from burn-out, one of the effects I noticed was that it was harder to concentrate, and especially tricky trying to focus on many things at once. I’d try to multitask, only to realise that all tasks suffered from lack of capacity to complete any one of them. The challenge is that the habit of always doing many things at once goes deep, and when I tried to focus on just one thing, I found that it was actually really difficult.  As I did a little google search on the matter, I found it seems like multitasking isn’t as healthy as once thought, and that it doesn’t help productivity. Some even referred to it as “switch tasking”, in the sense that the brain isn’t doing many things at once, but shifting rapidly...

Reality starting to hit...

Today has been quite a sad day as it is slowly dawning on my that I'm not going to be here for much longer. It's now less than a month till I leave, and I feel sad. Sad to leave what has been a life for me. Sad to leave so many wonderful people. Sad to not be able to continue to fight for and invest in all the streetkids, families, prisonkids, and other random people I've been fighting for all these years. I doesn't feel like I'm giving up, but it does feel like I'm going to be left with a kind of void where all these people were in my life. I guess not knowing the BIG "what next..." doesn't help, but I do have peace. Peace that the God who called me here, and has kept me here, is still the same. Peace that He will guide me and walk with me. Even so...today I felt sad.