The name of my blog, This time Called Life, is taken from a poem written by Walter Rinder that was dear to my heart as an adolescent in search of meaning, adventure, and purpose in my life. The stanza those words are taken from goes like this:
We arrive upon this earth alone
We depart alone
This time called life was meant to share.
Rinder wasn’t a great poet, but years later, the sentiment still resonates with me. Seeing my son come into this world and watching my father leave it really brought home to me how individual we are and at the same time how interconnected. We have the opportunity to learn through relationships and experiences shared with people, animals, and the natural world. One of the greatest challenges many people face is in being fully engaged in life and yet not taking yourself so seriously that the importance of your life, your choices, decisions, mistakes, and successes weighs you down and diminishes the simple pleasure of just being, just being in this time called life.
Feeling the need for change, I recently asked myself what was next for me in my own life. The answer that came was that I wanted to contribute to what I see as a serious issue currently effecting many people around the globe; the displacement and migration of millions of people, from Syria to Guatemala. So I decided to get involved in assisting refugees. I was drawn to Greece, where the refugee crisis is in full swing, with more than a million asylum seekers passing through the country, and over 60,000 people currently living in refugee camps waiting to be processed, trying to establish themselves in Athens and other urban areas, or living on the street unable to overcome the challenges of migration and relocation.
Last week I made my first trip to Lesvos Greece, a beautiful island in the Aegean Sea where the famous poet Sapho was born around 630 BC. The island is separated from Turkey by a three kilometer strait, and since 2016 thousands of people fleeing war and violence have washed up on her shore. Moria, the largest refugee camp in Greece, is located on Lesvos. Intended to hold a capacity of three thousand inhabitants, there are as of now over nine thousand people living there, with more camped outside Moria in make-shift tents, including a group of unaccompanied children.
While on Lesvos I facilitated a workshop for staff and volunteers working with humanitarian aid organizations (see photo below). The focus of my workshop was on healing secondary trauma in aid workers. Secondary trauma, often referred to as compassion fatigue, can result from exposure to traumatized people. I used a series of mindfulness and expressive art activities to encourage processing and healing emotional pain internalized through empathic feelings. My intention with this workshop was to give humanitarian aid workers tools to release the pain they feel, in order to be able to carry on with the important work they’re doing. My workshop was filled with inspiring people, most of them in their 20’s and 30’s who were offering free legal aid, planting community gardens, upcycling rafts and life jackets into marketable products produced by refugees, performing search and rescue, and overseeing the fair treatment of refugees in the camps, among other activities. It felt good to be among them and to offer my skills to help them to help others. After all, this time called life was meant to share.
Me (second from left) with some of the amazing workshop participants