Pivot!

Last year before moving to Ireland I bought a shirt with the word “pivot” on it. It had a picture of my favorite TV sitcom, Friends, from an iconic scene when they were attempting to move a couch up the narrow stairs of their apartment complex. One of the characters, Ross, yelled, “Pivot!” multiple times as he and his friends rounded corners and a comedic turn of events played out. 

I think about that word a lot now. Pivot. As I sit here and reflect in Ireland, far away from my family at a time like this, I think that’s exactly what God wants to teach me. While the characters in Friends used the word “pivot” to help direct them as they moved a large piece of furniture, for me pivoting is the ability to redirect yourself with the ever-changing surroundings in life, to accept what is being given to you, and let go of the rest while using your skills and your abilities accordingly. 

This wild ride of life forces us to pivot with each new crazy turn of events it throws at us. Like most, if not all, of the people in the world I value control and predictability. I like knowing that when I move to a new place I will have a comfortable home to live in, or that when I start a school program I’ll be able to finish it, or that when I go to the grocery store I’ll be able to find the ingredients I need to make a dish I love. Or that I know the next time I will be able to see the friends and family whom I love. 

Throughout my life I’ve always been future-minded, a planner. In fact, one of the things I love most is looking forward to a trip to a new place and being able to plan every aspect of it. I’ll plan not only our airbnb that we will stay in and our airfare but I will also create a map with all locations and hours of the restaurants, museums, stores, and nature attractions I wish to visit. I plan our days according to the locations of the places I want to visit in order to maximize our time. I memorize the transportation to get to each place along with how long it’ll take and which bus or train stop we need to go to. But, much of life can’t be planned in this way.

Since moving, I have learned to appreciate the word pivot much more than ever. For instance, when we moved, we had no idea where we would live; we had to do our house hunt when we arrived. In grocery stores I no longer knew if they would have the ingredients I needed and I remember looking a long time for zucchini called courgettes, for eggplant called aubergine, and pickles called gherkins. 

As humorous as it is now, it was really hard to be flexible with not only the new words but also every aspect of life. I no longer knew what going to school would be like, how I would make friends with people who had grown up in a totally different culture from me or even how I would get packages—called parcels—using a mail service very different from home. I had to figure out how to use home appliances that were worlds different from the ones back in California. I had to learn to live without a car in the terrible Galway weather, when even well-made raincoats failed to do their job keeping out the powerful wind and rain. Everything felt like a massive challenge and I had to to take a deep breath and allow myself to pivot all the time. I had to quickly learn to adapt. 

It’s ironic now that I have grown accustomed to so many different things in this new culture that I would have to pivot in such a large way again. My parents were supposed to visit two days before the U.S. put up travel bans with Europe, and elsewhere, due to coronavirus. Before this, I had only ever gone two weeks without seeing my family. It’s hard to explain how excited I was to be able to see them and the amount of disappointment I then felt when they had to cancel. I’m glad that they’re home safe with my sister, but I miss them so much. By the time I go home, by the time I see them again, a whole year will have passed in Ireland. I am attempting to pivot as well as possible as I self-isolate with Justin in Galway; I keep busy and try to accomplish what I can with the time I have here as I wait to see them again. 

Also, just as I was getting used to my school year in Ireland, NUI Galway had to shut down because of coronavirus. Like many others I’ve had to adjust to doing school online which hasn’t been an easy task. It’s interesting how quickly things change even in a single day now. One day school was running as normal and the next I was saying goodbye to my classmates I had only met several months prior. I pivot as I try to give myself grace and work hard on my studies when I feel motivated to do so.

For the first time in my life, I’m not able to plan the next day. Everything is changing far too fast for that. Like everyone else, we don’t know how long we will be stuck in our apartment, we don’t know when school will be open again and how we will finish our dissertations, we don’t know when the world will start healing from this. On top of all the grieving and unmet expectations, we are having to learn how to keep on our toes. With the rapidly changing situations worldwide we are learning to quickly evolve and change as needed. It’s so incredibly tiring, isn’t it? At times it hurts, a lot. But at least for me I know there will be some good out of this. With life comes change, but an ability to pivot will make all the difference. I won’t be as afraid to change and grow as a person and I will better learn to let things go and let things be as they will be. Maybe I will be better able to let go of my own expectations and let God fully have the reins of my future. For the first time in my life, I see how vastly out of control life is. There is no part I can hold in my hands; I cannot manipulate my life as I please. Like the well-known Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr explains, all I can do is let go of what I can’t control, deal with what I can, and hopefully have “wisdom to know the difference.”