This week I was notified of my acceptance to a program on my bucket list. It could not have come at a better time along with the news of my needing a hip replacement. This will allow me to undertake a Bucket List item (!) that I thought about a few months ago, but like most of them, I wasn't sure how my participating in it would evolve.
As it happens, the program is very well-suited to a flexible time schedule and will allow me to pursue it at my own pace, while offering me the opportunity to study in Switzerland and reconnect with a part of myself that I was torn away from over 30 years ago.
At 18 I went to Fribourg to do an advanced course in French for the summer. It was a wonderful blend of students from around the world. We all spoke various languages and were inspired by different reasons for being there, but we became very close very quickly because of our unique circumstances and being in that place at that time together.
I avoided calling home for the fact that I did not want to return. I remember being in the phone booth on the line with my father telling me I had to come back to Canada because school was starting for the fall, dropping to the ground in sobs, knowing I would never feel the same connection with the relatively homogenous student body of an Ontario College. I felt it to my very bones that I was at home there in Switzerland, with people who were open and delighted by one another's diversified backgrounds, who could juggle three languages at the drop of a hat, who were hungry to see and learn as much as they could in as many places as they could, who had experienced a rich cultural heritage that fed their identities in a unique, but differentiated manner.
This memory hardly registered when I applied to the school. I thought about being closer to family and in a country I really appreciated for it's beauty, and high standards of work, ethics and service. It was only as the time grew nearer to the acceptance date that I could see I had to do this as part of finishing what was started and left unfinished so many years ago. Whether or not I go for this one primer class in the fall and sign up for the entire 2-year program, it gives me a great sense of satisfaction to know I will be able to make my own conclusive evaluation and decision and gain closure on a part of my past that was left undone. Not to mention learning in an environment with global input on the state of economic affairs and their impact on humanity, unfiltered by media or propaganda.
With the US elections on the front page for the next year, and the circus that has become, it is a most welcome opportunity.
