Lessons

My position this summer is as one of the four coordinators for the Abrahamic Program for Young Adults (APYA) at the Chautauqua Institution (CHQ), and I have to say that I love my team. They’re supportive, funny, inspirational, and real.

Each day is a challenge. Some days I get to sleep with a smile on my face, content with the way I held myself, while on other days I welcome unconsciousness and ask for mercy, patience and strength to start anew. The days go by quickly, but each one is marked by growth. I’ve learned so many lessons in my four weeks here. I feel like I’m taking a hands-on course in interpersonal relations, and things I try to keep in mind and incorporate into my daily life include

• Each person I meet is carrying his or her own burden. I challenge myself to be sensitive and compassionate. 
• People will disappoint. It’s what we do. I challenge myself to refrain from getting frustrated, and I free myself from perfect behavior. From time to time, I will disappoint those I care about most, so I watch my intentions carefully. 
• Truth has multiple dimensions, and my eyes alone cannot chart all of it. In many cases, the victim of injustice or intolerance is also a victimizer. To work toward a common good, we must be able to acknowledge the injustice done to those who do injustice to us. While my eyes alone may not be able to understand, I can rely on the stories of others and my intellect to uncover what my ego may wish to hide. 
• There's a murky difference between respecting each individual's right to hold a viewpoint and respecting the individual's actual viewpoint. The former is necessary for civil dialogue, while asking everyone to respect all views seems to lead to conversations that don't go very far. I'm working on refining which views I respect. 
• While we are the owners of many identities, when one of them is under attack, we seem to experience a fight-or-flight response, where we see the attack on the identity as an attack on our character or distance ourselves from this identity and any implications on our character. This seems dangerous to me, and it makes the question of how I see myself more timely. How can I prioritize my identities when they're fluid? 
• According to Father Greg Boyle, "Service is the hallway to the ballroom of kinship and mutuality." That is, through service, we build valuable relationships that reinvigorate us when we share our stories. While we have a strong desire to do good and be helpful, we often find ourselves in a paradigm where those who give service are elevated in status to those who are the recipients of service. This turned me off from serving even though the ideal of serving is a strong pillar of my definition of a Muslim. I hope to re-engage in service by better understanding the delight I receive from serving.  
• I am who I am because you are who you are. After settling in at CHQ, I realized I behave very differently depending on the group of friends I'm with. With some, I'm much more calm and pensive, and with others, I'm spewing ridiculous things and straining to catch my breath from laughing. Different people bring out and help develop different sides of me. I'm afraid I don't know what being myself means when it's so tied to others being themselves. 
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That's a lot to keep in mind, and it's much harder to do justice to the lessons than pay lip-service to them, but I'm trying.

What are your thoughts? Do you think I oversimplified? Are your identities in a power struggle?