Wow, what a semester here in India! I am sure you all are feeling a little jet-lagged after your long flights home, and hopefully not too overwhelmed being back in America. We are missing you all already, and really reflecting on our time spent with you all. We couldn’t be more grateful for our group, and feel so honored to have travelled with you all for the past three months. We can’t wait to hear about what you all are doing in your lives moving forward, and know that you are moving towards great things.
It is easy, over time, for memories of a trip like this to become altered, so that you really only remember the good times. But the reality is, as Paul Theroux said, “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” We challenge you not to forget the hard times, those moments of stress or discomfort or doubt or fear. Those are the spaces of growth, when you see yourself clearly and how you move through the world. “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe. We hope you continue to take risks, explore the unknown, and push yourself to learn from challenge.
Let’s be honest, you have heard a lot from us this semester, so we will just leave you with this quote and let the great Henry David Thoreau speak for us:
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him,, or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, nor weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
—Henry David Thoreau
With so much love from Delhi,
Your grateful leaders,
Ben and Carly