Always A Need For Flexibility

When it comes to being flexible, often you hear quotes like:

But often when it gets to be the time that you actually need to be flexible, it’s a lot more complicated. It’s very easy to want to resist sudden change. It’s always difficult when you have a plan in mind and then suddenly that plan needs to get put by the wayside. However, most often if you try to resist the change, you end up having a greater struggle than if you’re willing to adjust to the new situation.

Dan had to learn early on in his EMS career that he needed to be flexible on every call. Often when people make a call to 911, they are not very clear and articulate because they are in a panic.  Often the information that’s provided to the dispatcher is not clear, and sometimes even wrong.

Back to Being a Baby - Part 2

About a year ago, Dan wrote a post about how we would need to go back to the status of “baby”. He talked about how we’d be entering a culture in which we would need to learn how to do all the basics in life like getting food, riding a bus, paying our rent, and so on. Even though all of these things we would be experts at doing in our own culture, we would need to totally learn everything new upon moving into a new culture. We may be adults physically, but socially, culturally, and linguistically we would be total infants.

Well, we are now three months into our new culture, and it’s confirmed we certainly are “babies”. Although we’ve learned many things such as where to buy food, how to pay our rent, which tram to take, and how to interact with strangers who talk to us on the street. One challenge is that we don’t look anything like babies. So while we understand and have accepted that there is always more for us to learn in this new culture, we’ve also needed to learn that often others’ expectations of us are much higher than we are capable of meeting.

The Question

The other day we went out to lunch after church with a group of friends from the Deaf church that we have been attending since we have been living here in Romania.  Our new friends have been very gracious and patient while they teach us Romanian Sign Language (RomSL).  Carolyn and I have made substantial progress in our basic conversational ability, but we are still sorting a lot of the basics out. If I’m truthful, I will admit that there are times that I do not completely understand what our new friends are saying, but often I can understand the main concepts.