as the sun sets on an adventure, a new one is born

MY DECISION
Yesterday I concluded the longest and most torturesome decision-making marathon in my life: I decided that I will return to Davidson College for spring semester 2006 rather than stay here in Würzburg, Germany.

I suppose by one measure the back-and-forth on this decision has lasted since my freshman year of college in 2003-04 as I sat in Dr. Henke´s German 201 course; in other words, I had been debating this decision for about two years when I decided to go to Würzburg, and now, even though I´ve been here for four months, the debate has somehow continued. Until now.

As I have found repeatedly at other potentially critical junctures in my life, I am extremely bad at decision-making. I am massively cautious; I scrape together a superabundance of evidence and carefully balance my options on crammed sheets of paper with long lines running down the middle. For every decision, I search for an almost mathematically explicit "solution." Worst of all, when all this fails, as it usually does, I end up leaning heavily on the advice of my friends, who understandably have grown deeply weary of my perpetual ambivalence and pleas for them to, well, make the decision for me.

This of course all bodes very poorly for my future, because important decisions are, well, important, and going back and forth a hundred times is surely worse than just choosing a path and following through on it. A few weeks ago on the phone, my dad put it exactly the way it is: sometimes you just have to make a decision and stick with it, even though you aren´t 100% sure that it´s the "right" one. The most successful people, he said, are the ones who get it right just 51% of the time.

There are a lot of good reasons to stay, and sometimes, glancing over the list, I am still moved by it: the ever-present chance, hope, faith, dream that it will all work out for me here somehow; the chance to see all of Europe; the desire not to abandon a plainly unbelievable and rare opportunity; the chance to achieve fluency in German; the spirit of adventure, because, who knows what would happen next semester?; and finally, the belief in not "giving up" -- as Harry Truman once put it, "I´ve had a few setbacks in my life, but I never gave up."

But then, after all that, I remember: I am sad and lonely here, and the people around me do not stimulate my interest, or seem interested in the things that I interest me. And it´s really just that simple, because all those other things don´t matter very much if you aren´t doing them with people you care about.

WÜRZBURG WAS WORTH IT
There´s snow in Würzburg today, and it´s beautiful.

To those who say I was a fool for ever coming, read this: I will never regret coming here. The chance to be alone with your own thoughts for a long period of time is, I think, a much rarer opportunity than one might imagine, given our world that is beeping and buzzing and vibrating with cell phones, blackberrys and instant messages. I rediscovered a patience and simple love for books that I had forgotten in the hurricane of lectures and essays and internship possibilities. I remembered how much I care about people and how much more sensitive I am than I sometimes choose to seem.

I decided I don´t want or need my life to be about waiting to achieve some magnificent accomplishment that will elevate my status in the eyes of other people. I decided I´m just as much a Romantic as an "Age of Reason" man, and just as much of a bleeding-heart Pascal as a rationally analytical Bacon or Descartes. "Does one need to love?" Pascal wrote, "don´t ask -- feel it."

Moreover, as is so often said, by temporarily giving up so many things that I care about -- my family, my friends, my professors, my college -- I won a deeper appreciation of them forever. Lying in my room in Würzburg, and just thinking about stuff, changed a lot about me. I´m a better man for coming here. Nobody can tell me that one semester in Würzburg was not "worth it."

A NEW ADVENTURE IS BORN
It is 5:59 in the morning December 2; I have one month and four days to see the rest of Europe. Until now, restricted by courses, the trips mandated by the program, and my own weirdly self-imposed sentence of imprisonment here, I had not even escaped to a non-German speaking nation. But informed that my decision to return home annulls my Würzburg course credits anyway, I´ve decided to abandon them and spend the next month traveling to as many friends and family as I can in the short amount of time I´ve got. In about 21 hours -- at 3:36 AM tomorrow -- I will begin yet another adventure that should take me to Edinburgh, Oxford, Florence, Madrid, Tours, Paris, Rotterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Switzerland, and finally Davidson, North Carolina. I don´t know if it will all work out -- if any of it will work out -- but it´s time for me to go now. The original mission statement I typed here in June, six months ago, explains that the purpose of this blog was "to keep track of my time abroad in Taiwan, China, and Germany"; that motivation to write here will cease tomorrow when I leave the last country on the list. I will have to come up with a new mission statement.

DOING THE RIGHT THING
Leaving Würzburg behind is hard for another reason -- over the course of all my constant back-and-forth decision-making, several professors stood by me, patiently tolerating my spoiled, self-important nonsense. And now, by leaving, it may seem to them that I have abandoned everything they wanted me to find here. But they would be wrong. If rediscovering how much I love my family and my friends and my Life is not what it´s all about, then what is it about anyway?

Every week I´ve been meeting with a German woman named Karin who meets with several students in our program to help them improve their German. Karin, a true lady and a wise person, had this to say yesterday: "big personal decisions like these can´t be made because of what you owe to professors you respect, or because of what they believe -- you have to make a decision like this for yourself."

And for once, tossing aside my sheets of pros and cons and bringing my head up from the tired shoulders of over-relied on friends, I am casting my fate to the wind and making my own decision. Maybe, on top of the other things I´ve learned here in Würzburg, I am finally learning how to make decisions, too.