On Belonging

This morning, I woke up at my usual hour of 6:30 and lay in bed for my usual 10 minutes before rousing myself for my usual cup of coffee. Maybe I'll just stay in bed today, is my usual waking thought. A fierce battle of wills commences, ultimately resulting in me forcing myself to flip the light on and slip my bare feet out of bed onto the chilled tile floor (fun fact, my room is the only one in our apartment without a working heater. Yay!)

The inevitable result of living somewhere for over three months is that you slide into a daily routine (something I've had to give a presentation on MULTIPLE TIMES in Arabic.. I might not be able to say much but I do know how to describe in excruciating detail my morning routine!). When I think about life here, it's hard to conceptualize it within a framework of normalness, simply because I am so far removed from the society and culture I have been acclimated to. But I guess that's the thing, nothing is ever actually a dichotomy, no matter how desperate Western knowledge is to frame concepts as such. So while life back home, in America, is "normal", that does not mean that life here simply reflects the opposite of normal. It occupies a more liminal space, something somewhere in between that encapsulates components of normality and comfort and simultaneously bewilderment and alienation.

Take this morning, for instance- I have a usual morning routine. I wake up. I get ready. I walk to Mustashfa Shmeisani, music spilling out of my headphones, past the dukkan and the bird garden and the three girls who wait for their school bus on the corner with their pink backpacks. The music is a welcome distraction from the lingering stares from slowing car windows, reclaiming a space in which I refuse to allow them to infiltrate. This is a recurring moment of normal.

But then we pile into a taxi, and the driver begins speaking animatedly in Arabic, and it's 7:30 in the morning and even with coffee my mind is not quite up to the challenge of deciphering sentences, so I sit silently in the back and disengage. This is a recurring moment of isolation and alienation.

I experience a plurality of these moments every day- moments that expose me as an imposter and then, not ten minutes later, demonstrate my inclusion.

I'm done with fusHa and another battle of the wills commences- to gym, or not to gym? And of course, the gym wins out because sleep was forgone in order to pack a bag of gym clothes, so I trek down the hill. I was doing this walk this morning, the same walk I do several times a week, and was realized that this routine- ritual, even, had come to embody a sense of home for me. Of place. Belonging.

Moments of realization like that- that not only am I residing here, in Amman, in Jordan, in the Middle East, but actually living here- instill confidence in me that I am not wasting my time, that I have chosen the right path in life for myself. That this is a viable life for me. It is comforting to come to acknowledge that I belong in America, but I also belong in Jordan, and that these belongings are not exclusive. These belongings differ immensely due to the affectation of the subtleties of context, and yet all the same, nurture the same inspiring thought in me. I belong here.