To Resurrection!

For those of you who don’t know me very well, I have a tendency to turn myself into an achievement machine. This, according to the description of an Enneagram Type 3, is my method for feeling worthy of love. Unfortunately, just like this blog, this tendency can turn into a narcissistic free-for-all.

When I was about 19 years old, one of my friends had the computer game “The Sims”. Having already become a sort of accomplishment robot, I had decided that video games were the scourge of the earth, but this game attracted me. I could make my little character do anything I wanted her to do; she didn’t even have to mess around with motivation and self-discipline. My mini-me earned a Juris Doctor degree and became a lawyer. She bought a house and a car. Every day she went to work. After she came home, she practiced piano for three hours. Then she exercised for as long as she was able. She didn’t date or marry. She didn’t have any friends. Sometimes she even forgot to eat. After a few short weeks of this impeccable life, my mini-me slumped into a severe depression. Flies swarmed the overflowing garbage bin, but my mini-me didn’t care. Despite multiple mouse prods, she refused to get off the couch. After being informed by the computer that she needed human relationships, I convinced her to walk outside and then forced her to make out with the neighbor guy. This kept her clicking along for a few more mini-days, but then she succumbed to her shameful weaknesses and again took to the couch. I finally turned off the computer in disgust and never played the game again.

It has taken me a long time to appreciate human needs and limitations. It’s pretty sad when, at the age of 19, a computer game knows more about the importance of human relationships than you. And still at 29 I often put work before people. And, just like my mini-me, I also sometimes slump into despondency and refuse to budge despite the little general in my head who insists that I suck it up and get back to work.

Because of my tendency to overdo it, I decided to observe Lent this year in two ways: One, I planned to give up bingeing (on food, entertainment, sleep, etc.), a technique that I use in an attempt to sidestep feelings of emptiness. Two, I planned to prioritize people over the self-consumed development of myself. So in the mornings, I’ve been praying about and meditating on these things. One of the great things about God is that, when you ask for growth, instead of instantaneously instilling in you a better character, She responds by giving you plenty of opportunity to do it yourself. All of this leads me to the unanticipated events of spring break.

Being a consummate Type 3, I am also a bit of a control freak. As a result, I am not the sort of person who does well with surprises. It’s not that I don’t like them; it’s that I like them so much I have to figure out what they are before they happen. In the months leading up to spring break, Scott had been painfully secretive. What was more, any forthright attempt to pry information out of him ended in curt discourtesy. He told me that I had ruined enough Christmases and birthdays with my incessant questions and that he would not allow me to do it again. So I tried other, less straightforward tactics. Spontaneous questions that I had phrased to sound casual: “So, what are you planning to do next week?” Urgent questions that desperately required an answer: “Will I be in Klaipeda next Thursday? One of my students will be having emergency surgery.” The “What About Bob?” approach: “Does our hotel in Mumbai have high-speed internet?” “What time Monday will we be arriving in Rome?” “Does my Mom know that we’re coming home for the week?” But Scott, who knows me too well by this point, stubbornly refused to answer, and I, for the first time probably ever, finally gave up trying. Sunday morning my friend Grace and I went running and then headed to a coffee shop to visit when Scott, who had been out that morning discussing a class he was auditing with a friend, stopped by the place. He asked to speak to me in private, no offense to Grace, so I stood and walked with him to the back of the shop. I rounded a partition and stopped. There, in the corner, looking small and out-of-place, was my sister. I stood there and stared for thirty seconds straight. Reunions on TV usually show people screaming and running and hugging and crying, but all I could do was to stand and wait for my mind to catch up with reality. I was in Lithuania. But so was my sister. That should have been impossible because my sister was in Michigan. No, she wasn’t in Michigan. She was here. But that would involve a day of travel. Maybe she had found a wrinkle in the time-space continuum. Or, I supposed, maybe she had flown here. And maybe Scott hadn’t been discussing C.S. Lewis with a friend from class. Maybe he had gone to pick her up! Finally, I wrapped my mind around it. Then I ran to her, hugged her and, in the spirit of overly-emotional reality TV, laughed and screamed and broke down crying.

Throughout the week, any hope of waking early and being anal-retentively productive dissolved. Lent itself (and I can do this because I’m Mennonite) was suspended. Instead of focusing on discipline and self-denial, I would have to focus on my second goal instead, which would translate to making sure my sister, for all of her pains to surprise me, had a rip-roaring good time.

Luckily, Emily is not shy about her desires. She’ll tell you what she wants to do, and all you have to do is hold on for the ride. So we watched a horror movie and went shopping and sang karaoke and sucked at bowling (twice). Emily somehow fell in love with Lithuanian cuisine and Lithuanian beer, which is probably some sort of Guinness World Record. We even did some traveling.

On Wednesday, we took the train to Vilnius and found a lovely hotel in Old Town. That evening, Emily took us out to an international bistro for dinner where we shared a bottle of wine and a cheese plate, beef bourguignon and Thai red curry chicken. The cheese was imported, hence international, and lacked the strange Lithuanian dairy aftertaste, which tastes as if every cow in Lithuania has been reared in an onion patch. In fact, everything we ate there was compellingly un-Lithuanian with the exception of the raw potato lumps that found their ubiquitous way into the Thai dish. After that, we headed to a local brewery where they serve almond beer (read: sickeningly sweet beer with almond syrup that also gives you vertigo). The next day, having showered and breakfasted and recovered our equilibriums, we headed out to take over the city once again only to realize, once we reached the concierge, that it was a holiday in Vilnius and that most things would be closed.

Being relatively new to Lithuania, I didn’t know which holiday it was; I was simply kicking myself that I hadn’t researched it and scheduled our trip for another day. As we walked through Old Town, however, we came to realize that the Lithuanians weren’t celebrating just any holiday. That day was the 20th anniversary of the end of the Soviet occupation. We found ourselves swept up in a mass of celebrators in Cathedral Square. We stumbled upon a mile-long parade with five marching bands. We even made it to the KGB museum, which was thankfully open and free to the public that day. We finished up our explorations toasting to our luck with cups of karstas vynas (hot wine) in the town square, except for Scott. (He made the mistake of ordering karstas alus (hot beer), which tastes like beer water steeped with a potpourri sachet. He drank it anyway.) All warm and bubbly, we caught the train home.

In addition to visiting Vilnius, we also spent a good deal of time on the spit, the narrow strip of land that stands between Klaipeda’s harbor and the Baltic Sea. On Tuesday, we took a bus down to Nida and climbed five thousand sloping steps of ice in order to catch a glimpse, from the top of a broken sundial, of the Kaliningrad area of Russia. (Emily, because she could see Russia from that vantage point, considered ditching her job in sales for a political career, but then reconsidered.)

Saturday, we again took the ferry to the spit and headed down to Witch’s Hill, a hiking trail through the woods that takes you past untreated wooden carvings representing Lithuanian folktales. After we caught lunch, we walked back to the bus stop where the sign informed us the bus would be by in ten minutes. We waited ten minutes, then twenty. No bus. I asked someone in a nearby shop where the bus was, and she informed us that, because it was Saturday, the bus wouldn’t be by until 5:30. Our two choices were to wait three hours in the cold with NOTHING to do or to try flagging down cars.

Before you rail against us for our stupidity, you should know that hitchhiking is a common practice in Lithuania. When we Americans think about hitchhiking, we think about rape, torture, dismemberment, and painful deaths in cold, dirty basements. When Lithuanians think about hitchhiking, they think about either giving or getting a free ride to a different location. One of my friends asked a Lithuanian if hitchhiking was safe here. He responded, “Well, sometimes hitchhikers do stink up your car.”

So, since we were all relatively clean and respectable looking, I stood on the side of the road and stuck out my thumb. I’ve always longed to hitchhike, but I also long to die at an old age snuggled up in a warm bed with all my body parts intact, so I’ve never tried it. After about twenty minutes, a car pulled over and opened the door. In the driver’s seat was a man with yellow, crumbling teeth, half-closed eyes, and a mournful, grating voice. He wore a black trench coat that was positively lumpy with the arsenal of concealed weapons beneath. Next to him was a young girl bound in electrical tape who looked as though she hadn’t eaten for months. We promptly climbed in and asked him to do with us what he willed.

Actually, it was just a pleasant middle-aged man and his teenage daughter heading to the car ferry. With my broken Lithuanian, I didn’t fully understand their destination until, after about ten minutes, he drove onto a boat. Emily, Scott, and I quickly thanked him, jumped out and ran back to land, only to realize that we were more than 3 miles from the sauna, our final destination, and that we didn’t understand entirely how to get there. It was at this point that I decided that we should, despite the road we could have followed, hike through the woods.

This is why I love vacations. They give predictable, regimented people a chance to do things completely contrary to good sense and call it adventure. Never mind that there was already a road. Never mind that we didn’t know exactly where we were going. Never mind that there was a guard tower ahead that looked as though it may have been concealing communist soldiers with bayonets. Having survived the hitchhiking escapade, I possessed a newfound confidence in our invincibility, so hike through the woods we did.

It has been so long since I have marched through the woods in the snow, with no path and no clear destination. The land stretched about us on both sides, peaking in soft, white hills. The bare trees stood still and sober as sentries. Our feet made quiet crunching sounds in the snow, and our cheeks flared pink. We finally reached a road and followed it north. After about 45 more minutes of walking, we arrived at the sauna, which is situated on a snowy beach on the Baltic Sea.

Emily must have been in the same mode I was because, after hiking Witch’s Hill, eating a strange platter of food, flagging down a car, hoofing it through a mile of forest, and walking a half-marathon down an unfamiliar road, she was ready and willing to strip off her clothes, sit in a burning sauna, and then run out over the ice and dive into the Baltic Sea. And so she did. This was the grand finale of her trip; the next morning, she boarded a plane for home, and we sadly said our goodbyes.

Since Emily, my dear Peanut, has returned to America, spring has returned to Lithuania. Lent has culminated in the joy of Easter morning, and I’m back to bingeing on everything imaginable and putting my to-do list first every chance I get.

Well, okay, maybe not every chance I get. And this is because Emily’s visit taught me one more thing. What Emily wants to do, she does. And when Emily does something, she does it hard. She walks through life with a blunt and feisty simplicity that is guilelessly refreshing, plus she has a whole lot of fun doing it. I realize, in the wake of her visit, that it doesn’t just affect others when I put my accomplishments in the forefront of my life; it also affects me negatively by depriving my days of a certain amount of beauty and joy. I always want to listen to Baroque choral music and attend chamber music concerts and read bucolic poetry and meet friends for tea and fall asleep in patches of sun and cook gourmet meals. But instead I’ve always got shit to do: papers to grade and a house to clean and e-mails to write and paperwork to catch up on. So, in the proper spirit of Easter, I now resolve to focus less on all the things that need to be done and to focus more on the beauty in which we all stand, awash. To life, and to resurrection!