Balance

Gdansk, Poland

 Note: this post was started at least a week ago, but I have not been able to upload pictures and publish it. So here's the text, with pictures to follow when I can. We are now in Antwerp harbor, waiting to debark tomorrow (Sunday September whatever).

I am seeking balance on this trip. There's the physical phenomenon where you exit the ship with a field trip group, and you all sway through town knocking into each other occasionally, causing you to instinctively clutch your pack or purse against pickpockets. And there's the arrhythmia of the schedule: no days of the week, but A days, B days, at sea days, in port days, overland ports when you can travel on land or stay with the ship, and the chomping-at-the-bit IPADs (in port academic days) when you can see the town but not leave the ship. Today was one of those, followed by a rainy evening that's nice to watch from the cozy Glazer Lounge.

Sometimes my cabin window faces the dock and at other ports it faces the water. One thing I can count on is that I turn right out of my door to go fore and to the library or faculty lounge, and left to go aft to either dining room.

Library needs ebb and flow with the schedule, with a rush for travel guides as we approach a port, and faculty requests for help getting articles or films generally coming in the morning after we've finished at a port and are looking ahead to the next part of the syllabus.

Emotional balance is harder to pin down. I set a time to meditate but keep putting it off when I need to use the time for more mundane things like checking on my bills or seeking a good internet connection. Sometimes I take an organized tour in port, sometimes I have a travel buddy, sometimes not. I exhaust myself on port days because I don't want to miss anything! Then I am too tired to contemplate navigating a foreign transportation system on my own.

I have seen beautiful buildings and works of art and heard horrific stories of how incomprehensibly inhuman people can be. Yesterday to balance the lighter trips I've taken I visited the Sachsenhausen labor camp and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The memorial was surprisingly haunting, given that it appears to be a random collection of stone blocks. But many of them are off-kilter, and the paths between them are rolling and leaning.