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| Danielle Robinette, right, with a friend at the Jeronimos Monastery while on an adventure to Lisbon, Portugal. |
In the final days of my semester abroad, I find that my time has been characterized by two quotes that I came across here in Spain.
The first comes from the movie Princesas from director Fernando Léon de Aranoa that I watched for my Contemporary Spanish Cinema class. (Forgive my rough translation.)
Caye: ¿Sabías que el mar aquí es muy importante, donde más?(Did you know that the sea here is very important, more than anywhere else?)
Zulema: No hay mar aquí. (There is no sea here.)
Caye: Por eso. Es donde más se piensa en él. Las cosas no son importantes porque existen, son importantes si se piensa en ellas… Mi madre lo dice siempre. Que existimos porque alguien piensa en nosotros y no al revés. (Therefore, here is where it is thought of most. Things are not important because they exist, they are important because we think about them… My mother always said that. We exist because someone is thinking about us, and not the other way around.)
While I still have yet to fully digest this scene, it struck me immediately as a lesson I needed to learn, or try to learn. We are all constantly moving forward in life. As I end my program here in Spain and return home to begin my senior year of college, I am confronted with yet another period of drastic change. Friends are graduation and moving to faraway places. But, their existence or role in my life is not dependent upon their physical presence, but rather how I think about theme, about how or whether I choose to remember them. As we move on, we must make the choice to keep them alive in our thoughts.
The second quote is from a novel called Right of Thirst by Frank Huyler that I found in the paperback exchange at my university.
“You have these experiences, and sometimes they are very strong ones. And then they are over, but you cannot say what they mean. And then you have other ones. And you cannot say what they mean. You just go on. Maybe you are happy, maybe you are scared, maybe you are sad. But you want to say, I learn this, or I learnt that, or I understand better. But maybe you don’t understand better, and it is not so easy to say what you learn and what you didn’t learn. Do you know?”
This is exactly what traveling feels like. Every moment feels like the most important moment of your life, until it is over and the next neat experience comes along. As college students, we live in a particularly temporary state of being. We are constantly moving onward and upward. Every experience is an opportunity for growth. However, it is so easy to miss out on the present trying to figure out what it will mean to you in the future. Some experiences or emotions demand to be felt, but we are so distracted with trying to understand the long-term implications that we forget to feel them in first place.
I could not begin to list all the things I have learned here in Spain. But, I know that these two quotes came to be at the exact right time to teach me the lesson I needed to learn from them.
Danielle Robinette, of Ft. Thomas, Ky., is a junior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. She is studying Spanish and political science.