Setting Intentions
I believe in living life with intention rather than purely having goals. Goals are often not tangible and change based on one’s life circumstances. Intention, on the other hand, is more of a mindset that one adopts in order to live a certain way. This might feel a little hippy dippy but I don’t really care. I have set lots of intentions for this semester, with some goals sprinkled in, and I’ve found that people are curious about them. I’ve probably heard the question, “why?” like a million times over the past few months so I’ve decided to explain my “why” as conclusively as possible so that anybody wondering why the heck I’m leaving the country by myself at 18 can understand my brain a little bit better. Unsurprisingly, most of my intentions circle around the Spanish language and general life experience but I think people might find them interesting anyway.
Being fluent in Spanish is something I have pretty much always wanted. I’ve of course studied it in school and watched tv shows and videos in Spanish but that doesn’t compare to the experience of living the language. I’m excited to live these next few months using Spanish as a primary form of communication. Rather than assuming that people speak English so that I can fall back on it as a crutch, I’m going to allow myself to be in a position where my communication skills are not at the same level as those around me. This way, I’ll be forcing myself to improve rapidly for the sake of survival. Maybe that’s a little dramatic but I don’t think it is. Being able to read and hear and understand the people and things around me is a source of safety, therefore, I’ll be more apt to learn and pick up on things in order to secure that safety.
Despite all of this, my goal is not to learn Spanish out of fear. That sounds like a miserable use of time. I want to learn Spanish because I love the language, I love being able to communicate with people in their native language, and I want to be able to use it within my career and personal life. All the things mentioned before about forcing myself to learn through exposure is simply the method I’m adopting to push myself into the level of fluency that I want to be at.
Along the same lines, I want to immerse myself in the experience of working abroad, in education, and using Spanish in the workplace. As of right now, I plan on working in international development in a Spanish speaking country and possibly in the education field. For about a month during my time away, I’ll be interning at a company called The English Connection which is an English language school in Spain. I’ll most likely specifically be working with companies who want to learn English for the purpose of conducting business with English speaking clients or partners. I know it will probably be difficult for me to adjust to using a second language in a professional setting, but once again, my intention is to let myself be uncomfortable with that and use the uncomfortability to push me to learn and to keep up with the people around me.
Since I’ll be doing work and utilizing skills fairly similar to those I hope to do in my career, I’m hoping that this experience will give me more direction as to whether or not I would enjoy doing such work. Based on my performance and feelings during this internship, I’ll be able to gain a better idea of whether or not this is a career that I should pursue. It’s especially useful to gain this experience before going to college as I would be able to change my education plans if need be.
Of course, no matter how cliché it is, a major factor of me taking this trip is to see the world and meet people. This is fairly self-explanatory as travel is a goal for many people. I’m very lucky to be able to have this opportunity so I want to take full advantage of it. I want to see as many things as I can, talk to people, meet people, and live the stereotypical touristy life for a bit.
Once I’ve cleansed myself of my tourist needs, I also want to prioritize living as a local and learning to view life through the eyes of others around the world. I don’t want to go to Spain and impose my American midwestern perspective on my experiences. I’d rather learn what the people I encounter think about life, religion, family, politics, and society. In order to do this, I’ll be putting one of the youth group’s biggest rules into effect: seek to understand rather than to be understood. I want to truly listen to and understand the people, things, and events going on around me. This will not only improve me as a human by making me more empathetic and teaching me things that I didn’t know before but it will help me be able to serve those around me better, both in Spain and in the US.
The final intention is to keep myself alive. For about a month during my trip, I’ll be living in an apartment and be forced to take care of myself for the first time in my life. As my mother knows, I often forget to eat and I also cannot cook to save my life. So this should be interesting. But the good news is that if I can learn a language, live and work in a foreign country, and have intellectual conversations then I think I have the brain capacity to figure out how to take care of myself. So you guys don’t need to worry about me too much.
This is not necessarily an exhaustive list of my intentions and goals, but they’re the main ones. The overarching idea is that I know I’m going to be uncomfortable at times and that I’ll have to put myself out there a lot to get anything out of this semester. But I’m willing to do the work because these are things that are important to me, and I encourage you to find things that are important to you too, and to live intentionally in order to do those important things justice.
