Change is in the air...

It’s been a long while since I blogged.  Maybe that’s because life has been crazy (which it has), or because nothing has been overly stressful (which it hasn’t, really, for a change...either that or the stress is becoming normal which makes it less stressful...), or because I’m finally in a “normal” routine (which is really no routine at all, but that lack of routine is the normal routine at last).  But for some reason the words haven’t been ready to fly, so I haven’t taken the time to sit down and write them.

But today feels like a day to write.

It feels like a day that needs to be documented, because change is in the air and yet that change is almost no change at all.

What brings this on?  Well, let me tell you.

Today, I bought dishes.

Not generic plates and bowls that anyone could have in their apartment, purchased quickly at Ikea for the going rate.  Not those plates at all.  I bought nice plates.  Plates that I love.  Plates that are so much cheaper than the Ikea alternative and yet make my heart sing because of how perfect they are for me. Plates that I can’t wait to use for dinners and breakfasts; plates that I hope to have on my shelves and sitting in my drying rack for years.  

There in lies the stress.

I bought plates that I hope to have for years…in China.

So often I get the words from that one song in the musical, Wicked, stuck in my head.  “Something has changed within me, something is not the same.  I’m through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game.”  That’s how I feel about this overseas life right now, in this moment of plate purchasing.  I came here for 2 years, will have stayed for 4 by the end of this school year, and now I’m buying plates.  The rules have changed.  The season has changed.  I have changed.  And here I am...with plates.

If that’s not commitment to a country in the life of this Teusink, I don’t know what is.

And so the change that is the air is no change at all.  In fact, that change is a level of comfort in a place that is at times oh so uncomfortable.  It is feeling at "home" in the furthest place from "home".  It’s staying when my nature is to move.

Change comes in many shapes and sizes.  Sometimes it comes in stability.

Mine came and manifested itself in plates.