My Inchoate Happenings Up to a Moment

Catlynh Phan: My Inchoate Happenings Up to a Moment

    This past summer, my friends and I took a trip up to my friend’s, Cooney, lake house in the-middle-of-nowhere, New Hampshire. We drove 11 hours from northern Virginia together, crammed in two small SUV’s. One day we were sitting around the dinner table and laughing and talking over each other about everything and anything, and (similarly to Dr. Redick's experience on the trail with his students) all of a sudden I looked around and felt as though there was no other place I wanted to be, and that this must be the best place not because of the location but because of the people that I had been so lucky to know and even to love. In reference to Dr. Carney's essay, he met a woman on the way to Budapest who, in a way, lit up the gloomy and unknown air around him on the journey. In these journeys, the people made the journey meaningful not in fact the destination itself. The people were interlocutors that we were in communion with. In this case, the interlocutors made meaning. I found meaning in all the inchoate happenings in all the times I met my friends for the first time leading up to this blissful moment of shalom.

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