The Final Countdown

Three weeks. 21 days. 504 hours.

That is how long I have left in Saipan. And while in some respects that still seems like a long time, I know its going to go by so fast that in a blink I will be sitting on a plane wondering what happened to those three weeks.

Time in Saipan is an odd concept. For the past 10 months, I have had basically no concept of time. Aside from the fact that I show up at work on time everyday, the rest of life sorta moves..well, differently. The weather never changes here so where most people mark changes by seasons, in Saipan I often catch myself saying, “Wait that was only a week ago? Seems like its been a month.” You look back and honestly can’t remember when things happened because everything is the same. And I have grown to love that. Life here is about people and experiences, not time. Not to mention that being in a time zone completely opposite from the rest of my friends and family has made time even more odd of a concept. I talk to my mom and she is heading to bed while I am eating lunch the next day. That is still weird to me.

And even weirder is that I am actually starting to like it. Yes, the always-on-time and tight-crazy-scheduled me  has begun to enjoy the fact that life is simple, easy, and not run by deadlines and clocks. Instead you base your day on if its nice enough to go to the beach or not. (thankfully, 99% of the time it is a nice beach day) What happens when I say goodbye to Saipan, get on a plane, and land back in a world where deadlines and clocks rule the hour and taking two seconds to be nice to the person behind the counter is all of a sudden an inconvenience. How do I adjust? Or more importantly, how to do I refrain from adjusting?

Therefore, the next few weeks are going to be full of lots of reflection and introspection. I am not the person that sat on a plane 10 months ago preparing to fly to a small island in the middle of the Pacific. And although I am convinced that my time here is at an end, most of me is very scared about the prospect of moving back to America. Part of me wants to call it all off and just convince everyone to move here. It really is a nice place to live. And as much as I would rather just put off the process of processing the past year, I know that it will be easier to start while still here and still able to run along the beach when I need to re-focus. Thus, I will be blogging about the past year and the changes I have made  in a sense to clarify and cement who I am and who I want to stay as I head back to life in America.