A Serious Step Lightly Taken

Yet again, Robert Frost has bailed me out of a tight spot. In three days, I'll be boarding an airplane en route to Kathmandu, Nepal, where I will be spending the next three and a half months, and have officially decided that a blog is the best way to communicate back home with the limited internet access I will have. Before I had time to stress about the title of the blog, my big black book of Robert Frost poems opened to page 334, to a poem that I had dog-eared for further reading. It's a poem that I have just started to explore, one that I have not officially gotten to know, but its title, "A Serious Step Lightly Taken", is so very intriguing.

I am a person that makes simple, everyday decisions with a great long-lasting pain: what brand of black tea will I choose, what mug I will drink it in, and what I will use as a footrest while drinking this tea every morning will occupy my every thought until the perfect solution has been found. But the big decisions, like where to go to college, what I want as my future career, and where to study abroad, I seem to make almost on a whim. Smith was the only school I applied to or seriously thought about, and from the moment I sent away my application the fall of my senior year, I can honestly say I have never looked back. One morning I woke up knowing inexplicably that I was going to be a teacher, a decision that has changed my life in a slow and delicate way ever since. And Nepal was the only country I ever really considered for my semester abroad, a certainty that came seemingly from nowhere. The only solid answer I can give to the question "Why Nepal" is it was the program that felt least like summer camp. Felt. That's the best I can do.

This blog will be a place for me to tell you all why Nepal was the choice I made as I discover the answers. Although of course I have nauseous butterflies in my stomach whenever I think of Tuesday morning at 8:50am, I feel an eerie calm as well, a calm that can only be explained as the effects of this serious step lightly taken.

Here goes nothin'!

All my love to you all,

Lillie