These last couple of weeks have been slow and weird.
Coming back after two weeks in the US has been tough, since I was getting used to that sweet dolce far niente made of rest and travels. Once back I struggled to resume my (mostly) dear routine: fitness, yoga, pilates, climbing... But one aspect of the routine was particularly tough: work.
I've been working while studying since I was 16, but this is my first full-time job. It has a lot of advantages on the money side and sometimes for personal satisfaction (restraint in this case, since it's not exactly my dream job), but having to deal with 30 vacation days per year is a struggle. Although it is quite a loop: you want to travel. but you need money for traveling. so you work for money. so you work for traveling. but then you can't travel when you want.
Anyway I'm learning to deal with it, even if the "drop-everything-go-wild" thing is really appealing to me in this moment.
This post was actually born in my mind with another goal: languages, and, more precisely, living in a foreign country.
Because this struggle is real too. Every time you never understand 100% of what people are saying, sometimes you understand 80%, sometimes even 50% when things get sort of technical.
Eventually you get used to it.
Eventually you embrace the fact that you have to fill these gaps with your imagination, hoping that what you understood was what the other person meant.
Because when the dentist talks to you about a surgery and you just understand that you have to take out 4 teeth I guess it's enough, but who knows what was he talking about during the rest of those ten minutes - what was that thing about antibiotics?
The language tends to become a background noise eventually.
You try to catch what you can, and then you deal with the fact that you can't do more. You nod even if you didn't understand, you try to hide the fact that you would like to have everything repeated and explained again.
Fortunately, to me this doesn't happen for all languages, but with the one I struggle the most, with the one I still love, the one that I'm living right now, but the one I have the impression I will never be on top of.
What I always try not to forget is that progress happens, even if slowly sometimes. Then those little moments in which you finally understand a word that you didn't understand before or you use an expression never used before, those moments become little sparkles of joy and satisfaction.