Over 100 days in Europe will change a person. I’m sorry that you won’t be getting the whole story about free travel – maybe you’ll get an interesting “One time in Europe…” story every now and then, but I am not going to write a book on my time there. I will carry those experiences around with me for the rest of life, though, as they have been added to my identity.
This is the essence of growth, I think: challenge overcome by modification of the self. We must strive to interact with that which is foreign to us, in order to be able to interact with the world in a more informed way, having a vast pool of experience to draw from. This experience reveals itself in character (a word which comes from the idea of being chiseled in stone), having a personality which is not subject completely to its immediate situation and has the power to affect the world around it, rather than always being affected by the world around it.
So the part of the mission of growth is achieving that chiseled-in-stone effect in our personalities which transcends circumstance and immediate pressures, allowing us to interact with the world from a firm foundation and empowering us to maintain confidence in our identities in the face of challenging situations.
I think the psychological benefits of such a foundation aren’t as easily recognized as the abstract process of character building is. You see, people respond to threats to their scheme (the model with which they understand the world) very negatively. Feeling safe is about being able to understand and predict the world around us, and when the mechanism we use to predict is put in jeopardy, it stimulates a defensive response. When we develop character through experience, we are able to handle threats to our identity, because we either disregard them because we have dealt with them before, or we recognize that we can handle this threat calmly, as we have handled many before it. We recognize that the world is full of unsolved mysteries which we will never fully grasp, and thus we can patiently adjust our scheme to all the information we encounter, without the fear that the puzzle which is the world just won’t fit together – because we know that we haven’t finished it yet.
Another benefit to being chiseled from stone is the freedom from existing in a constant state of self-doubt. For many people, life is like going to a Catholic church service for the first time. You can always tell who has never been to church by the way they look around constantly, looking to see what they should be doing at that particular moment. They get surprised and embarrassed when they can’t figure out when to kneel, how to hold their hands during prayer, or they hope nobody notices that they never say “Amen” with the rest of the church after the priest quotes some liturgy. They almost never take the Eucharist, because the whole process just looks too complicated, and they’re not sure they’re supposed to, as a non-Catholic. These people are completely out of their element, they do not know what to expect from the world around them, and they are afraid of the social pressures around them. Being chiseled from stone isn’t necessarily knowing what all is going on all the time, but being secure in your own identity enough to be able to say that despite what is going on around you, you are going to be yourself no matter what the social consequences.
