Summer has started. I will be leaving Poland in ten days. My mind’s eye is replaying the experiences I’ve collected; I believe they are gathered in here in some form. I have had several emotions about leaving; relief, and that constant one, regret (I should have taken that train over to Sopot that one night) predominate. There’s no changing the emotions, and there’s no changing the past. I think it’s best to just slip out quietly. Two formidable years and ten months have come and gone; years, I believe, when I look back will fit neatly into the stepping stone category. 

I’m gonna be good - those words came from my neighbor this morning. I like that send off - you’re gonna be good. (or the French, which my friend, Anna told me, “good continuation”). I think there is a new spring to my step too, stepping over from something  amazingly interesting/challenging to a more secure mystery.

I understand all that went into me coming to Poland and better than anyone I know the reasons out, but that one small part of me wonders if I haven’t been too hard on Poland - to be fair, each time I think I have, I am reminded of the times I’ve had to beg for my salary, have had to sleep in my winter jacket owing to broken promises to fix things up, generally stuff I am dusting out of mind - and I wonder if I had taken a different tune to it out here may I have had more reasons to be sad about leaving. 

My experience is what it is. I knew this would never be my place for the long term and I would have been gone last year had it not been for meeting someone who I thought I could work it out with. So, life plays it tricks. I hope it never stops playing ‘em.

Overall, I think I’ve had the right attitude all along about this place. If I’ve been misunderstood, well, I can understand that too, given what I’ve come to learn about people here and people in general. However, given my role as an educator of some sort, and owing to most of my impressions about the place coming inside of the classroom, I have no regrets in being forthright about my advice to the people here, along the lines of: no one’s gonna do it for you, so get on with it, the it being the doing.

I don’t know if, beyond being silently vilified, the message matters, but it is my analysis and I’m sticking to it. And the opposite, the prevalence of not doing it, the it encumbering everything as time heavies the burden, has to be cited as the core reason for my anticipation, and little sadness, in leaving. 

But for Poland and the people who I am close to, lest I have confused the countrymen and women in my analysis on this place, I want the absolute best, strongest, and all of the mosts, including the greatest economies and educational systems known to man, with gleaming infrastructure and overall shining beliefs in one self. And despite my leaving for the core reasons of being stuck in the transition (what a transition has been made, of course) in attaining them, I believe very strongly that all of it can be. I am not religious, and Poland has made me less so, in fact, but I pray that it will.