Banyak yang menanyakan saya momen yang paling berkesan selama perjalanan di NTT. Semua berkesan, kalau tidak saya tidak akan bisa menuliskannya kembali. Tapi kalau yang dimaksud adalah momen yang menempati lapisan paling dalam memori saya, dengan mudah saya menjawab ketika bertemu Pace, Lot dan Daniel.
Seketika saya merasa berhutang. Saya harus bertemu dengan saudara-saudara saya di pelosok Indonesia. Perjalanan mengelilingi Nusa Tenggara Timur ini baru permulaannya saja.
When we embrace this kind of ‘local’, it doesn’t matter what accent people speak, as long as they communicate seamlessly. It doesn’t matter who eats what for lunch, as long as they can share their dining table. It doesn’t matter who enters or leaves, as long as the community maintains, shapes and keeps redefining their locals.
Somehow, I didn’t care about the menu mistakes, the #meh coffee and all the tiring talks about religions and politics in this trip, but that LOL with a stranger perfectly ended my trip to Kei Islands.
I consider myself lucky as I could share my life and my time with those people with whom I could be vulnerable and grow together. This trip gave me ways to proof and live it.
Twenty four hours was not enough to explore the City of Bengkulu, let alone the province. But twenty four hours was enough for me to say that I was inspired by a mix of worry, quirkiness, gratefulness, hatred, pride and acceptance. Life feels more present with a mix of these feelings; I felt alive too.
Recently, I promised myself to hold my judgments when talking to others at least until I have to or they ask me to. I decided that active listening is paraphrasing not summarizing, it’s mirroring, not leading, and it’s clarifying, not judging. That promise was put on test yesterday.
The more I can befriend my own joy, my own happiness, my own strength, my own power, my own potential, the more I can celebrate another’s power without jealousy, without comparison, without making myself “less than” or “more than”.
