some thoughts on a report on a placement year

This is an old report written about the 7 months I spent in America. I've just re-read it after looking for pictures of the strawbale building process for my workaway profile. There is real circularity here. I was 22? just finishing my second year of Uni, and as I mention in the report I was, initally, entirely focused on the technical aspect of building. The trip actually felt entirely adjacent to my product design studies at the time. I was really using it as an excuse to travel, and to justify plans I had to build my own home to my family. I left with a distinctly american feeling of optimism, not neccesarily about the world, or natural buildings place within it. But rather, about the importance of community, and the impact our understanding of one another has on the micocosms that the world is ultimately made up of. Moab was small and accessible in a way i'd never experienced in either Brighton or London. Relationships, for better or worse, had an intensity that rarely comes without proximity. It had the feeling of a large ship on a long journey, each resident a member of passenger or crew. Although I have never experienced a long journey at sea I imagine there is a similar feeling of compression and localised intimacy in which all emotions feel as though they fill your world at sea. As I write this now, that sounds quite scary. In memory I remember how often I longed for everything i'd left behind. As I looked out over the worksite to the La Sal mountains, peaked year round in snow, I would often have a particularly bizzare craving for the 'rolling hills of England'. I knew this was ridiculous at the time and in the four years since, have rarely felt the motivation to take them in. Even stranger to me now was a longing for the city. When i'd return to Brighton (a city itself) from my studies in London i'd feel as though my friends were living life as though watching the TV through the glass of a shop window. In London I felt as though I was living inside the TV itself. In Moab I was no longer in the center of the world and I'd return to London like a long term prisoner put away before the invention of phones. Out of touch, out of date, but most of all, missing out. This report was written in the months after I returned and was required coursework, the only attempt I made to parse the experience I had just had. Many of the thoughts written in it, especially towards the latter half, were almost entirely subconcious, vignetted memories, before I wrote about them. This assesment would ultimately become the basis for the values I now aspire to, a still incomplete impression of my responsibility to myself and to others. The way in which this trip changed the course of my life has been gradual enough that it took 4 years for me to notice the water boiling, and now I'm 26, I graduated almost three years ago and it's been a while since I've had to change. The last time I left England I was embarrased by the unironic human experience, and now looking ahead to Germany, i'm pretty ready to embrace it.