Jet Lag

I have been back in the United States from Haiti for almost 72 hours now...and I am still out of sync. Although it is only about nine hours of flight time from there to here...plus about five hours layover time, the fourteen hours of re-entry are always challenging for me.

I always wonder what it is about our physical time clock and/or personal chemistry that makes such transitions difficult.  My stepson, Tim, just returned from India with a time warp twice mine, and he's still feeling the effects of his travel over a week later, and he is twenty years younger than me.  So the immediate suspicion it may be my age may be discounted, even though the affects may be more intense for someone as old as me...

I am persuaded we are creatures of habit.  We sleep better in our own beds, "thrive" on our regular diets, and are acclimated to our culture and pace of life.  Transplanted into a different time frame and plunged into a different culture--with unfamiliar food and someone else's mattress, things are different. Not bad.  Not necessarily painful.  Just different.

Haiti is a vastly different culture with its tasty diet of rice and goat or chicken. and its hot and humid days and nights.  The backdrop of its poverty-laden villages and open street markets hugging the main roads as well as its colorful tap taps in bumper-to-bumper traffic creates a vivid contrast to the life familiar to me.  As I left the Port au Prince airport after eight days to head for home, I could feel myself
already lagging behind as I prepared myself for re-entry several hours later in the Fort Lauderdale airport before connecting stops in Dallas and Sacramento.

And I am still lagging.  There are faded but inescapable images of what I felt and saw in Haiti.  The "jet lag" is the tiredness, I suspect, of a very hectic schedule and a lack of normal sleep.  But I am lagging behind for other reasons--I am not yet willing to jump back into the common and comfort of home; at some levels my emotions are still in Carrefourpoy, Cayes and Port au Prince where we taught and, at least for a few days, shared in a  world vastly different than ours.

I always learn something there--this was my ninth trip. I learn to embrace what I have and to remember what is really important.  And, as a result, I almost intentionally lag behind--not willing to rush back into my life of "more than enough", if not, "too much".

Jet lag.  It is a real phenomenon.

But it's not all bad on re-entry to take advantage of it to reaffirm lessons learned while away from the normal habits and pace of life.