If you want it, get it.

It's already been a full week since I returned from New Orleans, and it wasn't until last night that I really came to some sort of personal evaluation of what I came away from the experience with. The more I search for meanings or seek reactions from within me relating to accomplishments or moments in life, the less the meaning or reaction wants to come forth. Its reluctance could be termed some sort of emotional stage fright, where I am analyzing every detail of what I might be feeling, comparing it to what I expected to be feeling, and then trying to really get a read on what I am actually emoting.

Until last night, nothing was emerging. As usual, it was Jennifer that called it out.

The images that we all took back with us from New Orleans are a mixed bag of exhilarations and depressions, of awe and inspiration at the work we accomplished coupled with the shock and confusion at the level of despair still evident seven months after the storm and the flooding. Each of us, in turn, took pictures of the same houses torn in half and dragged across the street. We took pictures of cars twisted into likenesses of muddy modern art. We stopped moments when we could to capture the profound nature of the human spirit at work helping others who are unable to help themselves. In the end, I believe what changed was not who we are, but how we view ourselves and that city. For me, I expected New Orleans to do that, but as I sat leaning on my couch last night talking to my wife, I realized that the expectations I had put on the trip's affect on me were unrealistic.

All change worthwhile in my life has originated from within me. Even in the most obvious situations that called for it, if internally I felt stagnant and resistant to fixing the problems, they stayed the same. When we want something badly enough, we go after it. I looked at the trip as something that would be so overwhelming that it would immediately alter how I viewed the world, and in essence, how I would approach changing it. I felt that I would return and see my family in fresh light, that I would take action on things that I had lain dormant.

Well, maybe I will. That's not what I came home with, though. I came home with the realization that when change is going to happen, I am the catalyst. Outside forces, whether natural disaster, political corruption, or government malaise, are insufficient reasons for me to surrender control. They happen. What I can control is how I adapt to these things in my life that force me to react. That is the impetus for change: the overwhelming desire to re-route my course. If then, I want to see my family in new light, or if I want to resurrect something that I have put aside, I will do it regardless of what I have seen or experienced.

In New Orleans, as far as I saw and reacted to, that lesson is not taught, but rather a more depressing one supplants it. That lesson is one of learned dependency. Most of us have read or heard of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, where he espouses what might have happened had he chosen the other path. In that debate there is something that in the neighborhoods I worked in and toured, is inherently missing: choice. Frost chose, and that made all the difference. We chose to help and will continue to choose to do so. New Orleans must choose now too. It must choose to rebuild itself, one citizen at a time.