My desire for the hostel life started to grow ever since I saw an older girl (of maybe 13 years - when I was much younger) all packed with a giant suitcase and bedding in a public bus with her daddy.
And I remember the adult I was with (perhaps my dad or grandmother) telling me that they were sending the girl off to "hostel".
Years later, now , I'm living that dream. Although, as most realities goes - it's got the sour & bitter mixed in with the sweet. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
I'm only about 7 months into this experience, (and obviously have not experienced what certain other people who've been away from home for years and years to study). But here is what I've learnt so far :
1. On being stripped off of my original comfort zone and support system - wherein I left all of my friends and family behind in another city-I realized how much they had meant to me. How astonishingly big yet subtle a role each person had played in my life up to now.
And how much less, I had valued them.
2. But I also realized that I didn't need them as much as I thought I did - to define who I am, and nobody could tell me what to do with my life - and it really only mattered what I thought about myself.
Because in reality, every step I take in life is chosen by me - beginning in my mind.
3. I am not as needed as I thought I was. Perhaps, it can be said that I suddenly realized I had been walking around with a big head waiting to be popped to let the hot air out for quite a little while.
4. My friends become my family here.
And right boundaries (not walls or completely no boundaries at all) are so important for cherishable relationships (so true every where). I'm the kind of person who needs to spend time alone with God, and I realized that if I don't intentionally do that, it's easy to let my boundaries with people blur and just do what everybody is doing or keeping busy by myself.
5. That I am not perfect. I learnt that I cannot try to be perfect and win, I need to lean on God for EVERYTHING.
6. I learnt that growing up means that I am allowed to be child-like, with complete freedom. That "trying to look, act and talk like an adult" is a rather childish thing to do.**
7. That I am loved. Like Crazy. By a God doesn't need me one bit but will never leave me alone. No matter where, what or who happens.
That's why I want to serve Him all my life.
**
And I remember the adult I was with (perhaps my dad or grandmother) telling me that they were sending the girl off to "hostel".
Years later, now , I'm living that dream. Although, as most realities goes - it's got the sour & bitter mixed in with the sweet. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
I'm only about 7 months into this experience, (and obviously have not experienced what certain other people who've been away from home for years and years to study). But here is what I've learnt so far :
1. On being stripped off of my original comfort zone and support system - wherein I left all of my friends and family behind in another city-I realized how much they had meant to me. How astonishingly big yet subtle a role each person had played in my life up to now.
And how much less, I had valued them.
2. But I also realized that I didn't need them as much as I thought I did - to define who I am, and nobody could tell me what to do with my life - and it really only mattered what I thought about myself.
Because in reality, every step I take in life is chosen by me - beginning in my mind.
3. I am not as needed as I thought I was. Perhaps, it can be said that I suddenly realized I had been walking around with a big head waiting to be popped to let the hot air out for quite a little while.
4. My friends become my family here.
And right boundaries (not walls or completely no boundaries at all) are so important for cherishable relationships (so true every where). I'm the kind of person who needs to spend time alone with God, and I realized that if I don't intentionally do that, it's easy to let my boundaries with people blur and just do what everybody is doing or keeping busy by myself.
5. That I am not perfect. I learnt that I cannot try to be perfect and win, I need to lean on God for EVERYTHING.
6. I learnt that growing up means that I am allowed to be child-like, with complete freedom. That "trying to look, act and talk like an adult" is a rather childish thing to do.**
7. That I am loved. Like Crazy. By a God doesn't need me one bit but will never leave me alone. No matter where, what or who happens.
That's why I want to serve Him all my life.
**
"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval,
instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To
be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is
grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are
the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence
they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want
to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood
this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been
ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them
openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the
fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
-C.S.Lewis
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