I must write this to remember.
“The wind began to pick up. He knew that wind: people called it the levanter, because on it the Moors had come from the Levant at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
The levanter increased in intensity. Here I am, between my flock and my treasure, the boy thought. He had to choose between something he had become accustomed to and something he wanted to have. There was also the merchant’s daughter, but she wasn’t as important as his flock, because she didn’t depend on him. Maybe she didn’t even remember him. He was sure that it made no difference to her on which day he appeared: for her, every day was the same, and when each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises” (27). – The Alchemist
I was unable to sleep after finishing The Alchemist last night at 2:00 am. The story of a boy who heeds his intuition, seeks God’s guidance through omens and interactions with people, and gains insight from a man of the desert, The Alchemist stirs up in its readers a gentle, forceful, or levanter wind reminding to live a life of purpose – what is yours? what is mine? But even more, are you pursuing the goal in life that you most desire?
In Pursuit of a Non-Linear Path
Throughout the book, we see various situations of people who the boy meets, many of whom have neglected or smothered their ‘Personal Legend,’ as this desire is called, under pretenses of obligation and delayed gratification. The boy, after being in seminary until age 16, finds that his connection to God cannot be found in a school, and seeks to know more about the world. The boy’s father, while at first upset, agrees to help him to pursue a nomadic lifestyle by giving him some money for sheep, who need to wander to survive but who would give him income as he wandered as well. The boy remembers seeing a look in his father’s eyes that seemed wistful and nostalgic, and realizes his father had the same dream to travel the world but did not fulfill it. A baker he meets dreams of traveling throughout northern Africa, but decides to become a baker and have his business to save up for a month-long trip to Africa when he retires – it is not what he wants, but it seems a fair compromise given mounting obligations of having become a baker. The boy does not say anything but he knows that the baker is not fully satisfied. Along his journey he works for a crystal glassware seller who desires to complete his trip to Mecca as one of the five pillars of Islam, but tells the boy even after the boy helps him to gain enough money to go, that he prefers to dream about it rather than achieve it. His hesitation and apparent disinterest undermine what the boy eventually discovers is the most important part of deciding to fulfill a dream: a person is refined and becomes more deeply able to live a fulfilled life by experiencing the process of pursuit.
The dream the boy pursues in The Alchemist is to find a treasure near the Pyramids of Egypt which he saw in a vision. While the focus on finding the treasure is for him not driven by a desire for monetary wealth, he recognizes that until he fulfills this dream, it will nag and impact his life negatively. I know that feeling. Not just a lingering “what if…?” but also the “why not now?” All the big and bold decisions that he makes in the book, he makes based on what he has learned in prior, perhaps seemingly distracting interactions with people along the way and by seeking omens from God: to be a shepherd; to sell his sheep for a ticket to Tunisia (he starts out in Spain); to give his money to a guide; to stay in Tunisia for a year; to go to Egypt with a caravan across the desert; to live in the moment; to speak of a vision at the risk of death; to trust in nature’s power through God. Each of these moments teaches him lessons that build on each other, and which are necessary to learn and be built on in order to fulfill his dream. His path isn’t linear. It isn’t supposed to be.
I know that I want to connect people together across cultures. I know that the fulfillment of this dream is not a specific job or location. Yet I also have learned through painful experience that my shortsightedness of thinking it is has led to resentment, rage, and bitterness. Does the pursuit of my dream mean leaving San Diego? Does it mean leaving Gustavo? No, it means pursuing my dream. Did the boy decide to “leave” his dream of being with the merchant’s daughter because the treasure was more important? No. He decided that right now, the decision was whether to follow his dream, whatever that looked like for today. The relationship would play itself out. The details would vary. And interpreting the dream, as he finds, is in itself a skill, built on the lessons he learns and the value that others see in him.
This current job search has enabled me to reflect more wholly on my pursuit thus far. What excited me about the External Programs Coordinator position at the USD Ahlers Center for International Business was as much its specific focus on connecting people across cultures as it was the need for someone with experience abroad, in education, and in business. Who wants a woman with 8 years of seemingly disimilar work experience? Apparently, they do. I did not get the part time position, but there is now a full time position I will apply to this week. Whether or not I get the job, I feel more at peace that my career path has not been linear.
I felt closest to my dream when I was working in Oaxaca at Divertigranja. I was living abroad; I knew I needed to have experience abroad to follow my dream. By following that knowledge, I learned many things about displacement and diversity of thought by immersing myself in “elsewhere” – and that voluntary and involuntary displacement are both key to connecting people across cultures, and without it, my pursuit would be shallow, misunderstood, unreal; the difference between sympathy and empathy. In my role at the farm, I also was doing a variety of things, both mentally and physically stimulating, and have since found that to be where I am most in my element. My main role was to create connections between groups on all sides. Do I want to return to Divertigranja? Part of me wants to return every single day I’m not there. Yet I cannot bring myself to respond to Hugo’s email that has been sitting in my inbox for a month … mostly because I still can’t justify having left.
When I decided to visit Divertigranja, I got a job here, in 2011 at FLOC and in 2016 at UTAS. Is that an omen? I’m not sure. At FLOC I was tested by moving across country, I tasted of the pungent dichotomy that is the Washington DC transient vs resident communities, I found my third home. I also learned how not so great of a program coordinator I was, of the need to be concise and more organized, of the reality that good communication with a manager is not as natural a talent of mine as I thought – a reality that has bitten my heel now multiple times but which must be learned. At UTAS, I experienced that reality more harshly. Yet do I understand the world of Supply Chain a bit better than I did three years ago? Yes.
Expecting So Much Less of Myself
Perhaps God decided that I needed a taste of a dream fulfilled as I wandered lost in my cubicle world last year. 8 months ago I decided to lose weight, based mostly on health concerns from my doctor, but also on the pursuit of health for health’s sake. Because my Body Mass Index (BMI) was in the obese category, I wanted to know what would it feel like to be a healthy weight, or at most 24.9 BMI. That meant a weight that I have not been at since close to puberty, a weight that seemed unreachable unless I made some unrealistic diet plan that didn’t seem sustainable. A 36 lbs weight loss. Yet here I am, 8 months later, not quite there yet but 29.5 lbs lighter. In the pursuit of this goal, I have built my balance, gotten stronger, and reached beyond most milestones I set for myself which also seemed unreachable when I wrote them. Initially I challenged myself to reach that 24.9 BMI by June 30th 2017, and maintain the weight for the next year, as a SMART goal. I will continue to pursue this dream, because it’s in the pursuit of the dream where the magic happens. I have learned the ways my body works to fuel me. I have experienced the calories in vs calories out, empty calories vs rich calorie intake. I have become more mindful of my lifestyle – and the process has changed my life.
In pursuit of my healthy weight goal I learned much from a Kaiser Healthy Balance class, and my food consumption habits, portions, and tastes have naturally shifted. I took up cycling and have learned much about road cycling culture, challenge, and finding my place in a displaced setting; 
it feels dynamic and meaningful to be present as a voice in that culture. I feel more at home in my body and admire more and more what it can do. I have never really thought of myself as ugly; now I’m just eager to be good to myself and I can’t help but notice the beginnings of a toned body and the elation of endorphins as the fruits of my labor. I have already adjusted to seeing my natural size as one near my current weight, not 15 lbs heavier and 3 sizes larger as I have seen myself for many years. That adjustment and re-alignment has been one of my life’s biggest surprises – not so much that I got to a certain threshold, a milestone I intend to keep, but that I was expecting so much less of myself before now.
This idea of the unreachable dream… I can tangibly feel that levanter wind start to pick away at the word “unreachable”.
Viewpoints from the Horizon 