A few weeks ago, before leaving the villa in Riva San Vitale, I wrote a post about what I thought I had learned during my semester abroad. I came up with the post after looking at my list of goals for the semester that I had written back in October, and thinking about which of them had been most fulfilled. After getting back into the normal routine of life, however, I have a slightly different perspective and a number of things have continued to stick with me that I’d like to share.

When I was driving down to Blacksburg, Virginia two weeks ago to move into my townhouse, I was reminded of something I heard this spring: we leave so that we may return. I don’t remember the exact words, nor do I remember who spoke them (I think it was Nikki Giovanni when she came to visit), but it hit me what that really meant. Traveling Europe and meeting interesting people is a great experience, but if all it becomes is a fond memory that has no effect on us once we get home, it’s hardly worth the thousands of dollars and delayed graduation that it cost to do it. We leave our surroundings so we can get a fresh perspective to bring back with us to our normal environment.

I started wondering what it was that I was bringing back with me to my life in Blacksburg, so I turned off the music, rolled up the windows, and reflected (something that I never would have done before last semester – so that’s one thing already.) Thankfully, my phone has voice transcription, so for the next couple hours I spoke my thoughts out loud to my phone so they would not be lost as life grew more hectic after I moved in and started working full-time. The rest of this blog post is made up of those thoughts and some explanations; you could say, as one friend of mine would put it, that this post is a series of epiphanies.

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