This feeling, like a finger poking me firmly in the belly just below the ribs was prompted by the return of an acquaintance who just made it back from the Peace Corp. I remember meeting her just over two years ago when she was talking about applying. I wasn't that close to her, but like me, she blogs (though clearly more for the sake of keeping friends/family in her life that for personal reasons) but it was interesting to contrast her own life with my own.

What is most concerning though is the sense of hollowness/emptiness that I had reading her posts. It's the same feeling I get when I go over a small hill in the road too quickly and the car is momentarily airborne. I don't really know what to make of it. It's always hard for me to make sense of my emotions which is why I try to pause and figure them out when I have unsettling ones.

After reading it, two things became very apparent. The first was that two years is not long at all (but by the same note -- it is a lot of time to waste). The second is that on a relative basis I have had very little growth. As much as I like to pretend I am changing and maturing, I am still relatively static. I have given up a few bad habits, but overall I think that I am still the same as I was when she left. I mean, I don't really know how much she has grown, but I can only imagine the transformation that had to occur after living in such bare bones conditions in a foreign land. While I don't think the Peace Corp is necessarily the right decision for me, I do think that here is likely something I could be doing that would be helping me to be the type of person I need to become. It's all to easy to get caught in a cycle of reasonably satisfying material improvements but moments like this remind me that time is so fleeting. She's lived in another country for two years, seen a different way of life, learned a new language, helped hundreds of people. You can do a lot in two years, or you can do very little.