My two years as a house tutor and teacher at Fettes College, a co-educational boarding school in Edinburgh, Scotland, now seem like a dream.
Within a month of my return to the U.S., I plunged into the first year of my master's program in journalism at the University of North Carolina. The sudden transition and hectic schedule left me little time to contemplate my overseas experiences. My intense first year at Chapel Hill forced me to focus on the "now" and left little room for reflecting on the past.
As those who now find themselves graduating from high school or college are well aware, summer holidays offer the perfect opportunity to bridge the gap between past and present, between present and future.
Though my time in Scotland slipped into the past with little fanfare, I know I was there. And I know how much it meant to me. Memories of that life come in the form of flashbacks -- fleeting but crystal-clear images.
I see myself walking past the cricket pitches (fields) to get to my boarding house, where I lived and worked seven days a week as an assistant housemistress for about 70 teenagers. I still think of them as my girls.
I walk across the patch of grass we called "the Queen's Lawn" (only staff and school prefects were allowed to step on it) toward the main building, a Gothic structure rumored to have inspired J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts. This is where I team-taught English. If I looked to my left, I could see Edinburgh Castle lording over the city on its throne of volcanic rock.
For both the fun times and the hard times (there were plenty of both), I cherish my stay in Edinburgh. Living overseas in the years after my undergraduate education, at the risk of sounding trite, changed my life. I wish every young graduate could have the same opportunity. The only thing you stand to lose through spending time overseas is your old perception of the world. What you stand to gain is infinite.
I struggled with the decision of whether to return to the U.S. I dreaded the thought of leaving my city, my friends and my girls. Out of all the cities I've known, Edinburgh remains my favorite. Professionally, however, I feared I was stagnating as a teacher, but I didn't feel passionate enough about it to undergo the training necessary to progress to the next level.
I realized that staying in my life there for the sake of comfort and familiarity would be more cowardly than returning home to enter the next phase of my life here. Staying would have been easy. And if I learned one thing through living overseas, it was that greater risks yield greater rewards, or at least better stories.
So I ended up at UNC-Chapel Hill, not entirely sure where it would take me but knowing that, at least there, I would be challenging myself and studying something I enjoyed. My first year passed in a blur that I am happy to let simmer for a while before I try to distill what it meant.
These days, my "now" is enjoying the bustle of a newsroom and deadline pressures as an intern. It's the pleasure of sitting down for a cup of coffee with someone to chat about something wonderful he or she is involved with. It's hunching over a computer keyboard to share that experience with the community. It's riding in my car with the windows rolled down, listening to oldies.
And my future? Right now, I'm content to view it through a camera lens, taking my time deciding how I want to compose the picture of my future.
A very wise man, a friend and professor of mine at Chapel Hill named Jock Lauterer, encouraged his photo class to "fill the frame with significant matter." For me, this summer is my significant matter. My future now is enjoying getting to know Moore County and learning from every person I meet.
Looks promising to me.
Kirsten Beattie, a graduate journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill, is working this summer as a newsroom intern at The Pilot.
