I kept looking around, as if someone would come and save me and make it not so hard.
It was just an invitation, an offer to eat lunch together. You wouldn’t think it was that big of a deal. But it is. It’s still scary to try to get to know people in this new culture. It’s still hard to try to navigate these first encounters in my new language. And though I know I need the friendships, I still can’t talk my courage into paying the price that costs.
“Ab sofort.” Right away. The words at the end of a press conference, that changed the course of a nation.
November 9th, 1989, just six months after my own birth, came a decision and an announcement that one no longer needed express permission to leave the DDR (former East Germany). Within the hour the Berlin wall was being flooded with citizens of East Berlin, celebrating a freedom they had not experienced in over 28 years. A momentous occasion and one that is celebrated on this, the 25th year anniversary of the boarder opening.
My savior never came. But maybe that in itself was my salvation. When you have a bit of comfort to hold on to, you give up the opportunity for something new.
A city, a land, divided by a wall of ideology as thick as stone and as sharp as barbed wire. A city, a land, allowed to be united on an unsuspecting November evening. We have pictures of the wall being rushed; of laughter, tears, and celebration. But surely that wasn’t the whole story. Surely there were some people sitting in a café, wondering what it meant to have two places come together. Surely there were a few that were not courageous enough to charge into the Brave New World before them.
I wish more than anything that I could avoid the awkward movement of stepping into the unknown. And when those awkward moments come, all of my all of me wants to fall down on the floor like a two year old and yell and cry until it goes away. So deep is my maturity.
You still have to say yes. It doesn’t matter how you feel at the moment, you have to try to pull a “Yes,” a “Ja,” a “Si!” from your gut. Community is too important to run away from, and when someone offers you friendship over a meal, there is too much good before you to take the easy way out.
It’s an hour of wondering what good it does to remember the past and of laughing about TV shows as you eat falafel, but it’s so much more. But the “more” has to be discovered.
It’s out there, it’s waiting.
Still Wandering,
Tony