Return to the City

I don't have everything that I wish that I could have. I'm not the woman I wish that I could be. But, I am longing to be rooted and to be known, to love a place and a people even when the going gets really tough. And so, somewhat suprisingly, I am returning to the nation's capital after a year away.

My reasons for moving cannot be fully explained in words, but there is a part of my heart that hungers to hold up my flickering candle in that mass of people and say "I'm here, and I care about this city." Almost three years ago, I moved to DC to work in the national policy scene and participate in a fellows program that enabled me to deepen my understanding of what it means to be a person of faith in today's culture. The program helped me find grounding for adult life and broadened my perspective. Meanwhile, the policy scene was a bit disenchanting and in many ways unfulfilling.

Soon after getting to DC, I felt like I had left the kiddie pool and migrated to the Olympic-sized lanes, complete with a high dive, big wall timers, and a swath of well-trained athletes. However, interestingly enough, I also found that most of the athletes were there for one thing: to win. They weren't interested in the impact that the pool's facility might have on the surrounding community, they had little concern for the preschoolers who were learning how to swim there in the off-season, and they seemed unconcerned about the health and well-being of the other teams. After all, it was a competition and only the strongest survive. But, this winner-take-all sort of attitude bristled me as someone who had grown up in small Southern towns where it was simply impossible to ignore one's neighbors and community was more than just a buzzword for an institutionally-driven initiative. In the words of Jane Jacobs:

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

What I wanted when I first moved to the city, and still want today, was to foster a deep sense of community in and amongst its people, despite the disparate issues and limited resources that abound within its borders.

The fight for any city's prosperity, and for its peace, is most certainly a hard one, but its is also a noble and worthwhile fight. When I first approached DC, I came brimming with perhaps a few too many doses of youthful optimism and idealism. My attitude of "you can save the world" and "our generation can do anything," slowly wore off over the two years I spent living and working in and around the DC metro, and probably rightly so. I cannot save the world, and our generation cannot do absolutely anything that it wants. There are limitations, and quite frankly there are a lot of things that are a mess. But, at the same time, little pockets of renewal are possible.

And so, later this summer, I return with the hope that I can be a part of the change that I wish to see in the world, while recognizing that I am also in need of transformation. While I am not everything that I wish I could be at this stage of my life, and some days I just feel like going home and curling up under the covers to cry over my failed expectations, I recognize that my story has many pages yet to be written. I also recognize that mine is a story much bigger than myself. The goal of life is not, in fact, me and mine, but rather something much more significant and in many ways much more complicated. I am moving in efforts to live more fully into this realization, while remaining thankful for the many gifts of my former community.