Scattered Thoughts and Time Zones

This past month has been a bit of a blur, and my inconsistency in posting reflects that. Between summer camps, travel to Goychay, Sheki, Zagatala, and a trip to America that included a wedding, I've been feeling a bit scattered in my thoughts.

A lot of people have asked if it was difficult visiting America, if it was difficult to return to this hyper-capitalist land of pork and money. The short answer is no. It was seductively easy and enjoyable to come back to my cultural homeland. It was everything I had been thinking of and didn't disappoint. Seeing family, experiencing incredibly fast internet and extremely cold air-conditioning, eating Chipotle, BBQ, and Sushi-it was all just how I imagined it would be.

Rather the greater difficulty was fast forwarding in time, if only for two weeks, to a point where my service was over and the greater questions of 'what the heck will I am be doing with my life now' sounded loud and clear. I've said many times that I will relish this time, the first time in my life, where I will have almost complete freedom to choose my next step and I still believe that. But this is accompanied by a pressure to choose a 'correctly'

I want to travel. I want to live in Greece and Turkey. I want to backpack around South East Asia, China, and Patagonia. I want to live a life that allows me to teach but not in a classroom. I want to live simply and minimally but also have some sexy designer furniture and unnecessarily extravagant dinner parties. I want to be able to see my family and friends and feel emotionally fulfilled while intellectually stimulated. And I want this in the next ten years, not the last ten.

I feel that my time in Peace Corps, just like all time in life that precedes another time, should be some sort of preparation for achieving these future goals but my thoughts of recent have been scattered as to how to begin. One huge advantage when working for Apple was that there was a boss or a mentor to provide direction when needed. Now I feel like I can hardly keep my head straight on how to begin a simple Teacher Training Project.

They say begin with the end in mind and I guess I should be happy that I know what I want to be experiencing. I'm just finding that I have just as little clue on how to get there, just a whole bunch of scattered thoughts.