What comes from review

I have to write a page about my "feelings and impressions from the first day".  It seems easy enough.  But it isn't.

The things we did in class today are things I learned for the first time in my sixth grade Italian class.  I should have felt bored, tired.  But I didn't feel that way.  And it's for this reason that it isn't so easy to write about my emotions from the first day: my emotions aren't what they should be.

Even though the material today was easy, I was happy to go over it because it made me reflect.  It is so strange to think that it has been almost ten years since I started studying Italian.  There is a part of me that feels as though that period of my life, the sixth grade, is almost foreign.  But at the same time there is another part of me that feels as though it is still very near.

Obviously I am not the same exact person that I was when I was eleven years old.  I've grown.  (More figuratively than literally, since the sixth grade I've done very little literal growing).  I learned things.  Academic things, yes.  At that age we all spend the majority of our time in a classroom.  But I also learned facts and concepts outside of the classroom.

This year abroad, here in Florence, is in a way the biggest and most important exam I've ever had to take.  I turned twenty this summer, and now I am here.  What have I learned?  Do I really know how to learn these things?  Can and will I use them successfully?  We'll see.

These were my thoughts in class this morning.  Going back on the simple concepts, the building blocks, made me realize that my life is much less simple than it was in the past, and that most likely it will continue to become much less simple.  I think that I'm ready.  There will be challenges, sure.  But I believe that God doesn't give us challenges we can't overcome.  He gives us difficulty, without a doubt.  But it is from difficulty that we learn.

Class today made me think of all of this.  It made me reflect on my past, made me think of the present, and made me think of the future.  Perhaps in these thoughts of mine there is a beautiful metaphor: that big and important things can come from simple things.  So, we'll see what happens tomorrow, this year, and in the distant future as well.