Life Graph

I have returned from my retreat, and am very glad it happened. We really had a blast. Tim was less about formal/forced heart to heart conversations (though some happened) and more about comfortable bonding. We played several games including mafia, apples to apples, and reverse-hide-and-seek which is also called charades. It was not apparent during the activities, but this worked so well. We really all got very comfortable with each other over the course of a few hours.

Before bed we all made up questions and put them in a hat. Then, one at a time a question would be picked and read. Everyone would write an answer down and submit it. The object being to guess and learn who the answers belonged to.

Finally, this morning we all sat around and gave/listened to our life graphs. Essentially, you are asked to talk about yourself, your life, the ups and downs, the major moments that have gotten you hear. It's funny what you think of. When you are given 30 minutes to think up how you would explain to a room of people who don't know much about you, who you are and what the 20 some years of your life have consisted of, a lot crosses your mind, and it is really difficult to create one narrative. It seems to jump around, and without a doubt, much is glazed over or missed all together. For everyone it seemed, myself included, there were points we either meant to but never said, or realized we just did not include moments after we finished speaking. You sit and wonder how such a momentous event could have escaped you, or what you spoke about instead, and how people might not have totally gotten you from it by having left this out. As time passes you think of more and realize how incomplete the portrait you painted for them was.

Hours later, and I still am thinking of things I wish I had thought of then. But, how can someone totally explain to anyone who they are in 5-10 minutes? Would it even matter if you had an hour, or a day? And yet we still are able to know or loosely know and understand the people around us. For most of us, conversations like this never occur with a friend. Maybe over the span of months or years the details of this 10 minute depiction are revealed, and even then, maybe not. Still, we believe, we feel, and maybe we even do know these people around us, without ever knowing their life stories. Is it that the past doesn't matter? Or is it that we reveal more about who we are casually than we realize?

I am going to start on my 'college moments' blogging this week. I really want to give it a lot of effort and I have recently found a way to fill every hour of my week, so we'll see how it goes.

(We started the retreat with a cook out. Picture above is pepper/potato/tomato shish kabobs, burger patties consisting of sausage/turkey/beef/cilantro/onion/pepper and quail. Yes, quail.)