Enjoy right now, today
SA: CASA: Barcelona, Spain
Florence, one of the Semester Abroad Correspondents, shares her experience abroad during the Spring 2025 semester. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed.
As exciting as my time abroad has been, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the vast number of changes, social, economic, and otherwise, unfolding back home in the States. In fact, between the unsettling headlines from The New York Times, the worried calls from home, and the never-ending slew of new procedures, precautions, and provisions regarding reentry into the U.S., it’s all I’ve thought about.
My worry about the world I will return to has, at times, cast a shadow over my experience abroad. An innocent trip to Mercadona for groceries comes with a pang of unease, knowing how many back home are struggling to afford the most basic provisions, like eggs. Pictures from a trip to Amalfi are met with a quiet heaviness, a guilt that I can book trips across Europe while millions in the States have suddenly found themselves the victims of mass layoffs.
Of course, none of this is my fault. No action or inaction on my part while abroad can change the realities my countrymen face back home. And yet, more often than not, I i’have found myself carrying the emotional weight of it all across the Atlantic. The solution? For me, it has been learning to acknowledge that things, whether good or bad, simply are.
While this may sound cliché or trite, it has offered me a much-needed reassurance as I navigate this once-in-a-lifetime semester abroad; striving to enjoy the present while staying attuned to the developments affecting my family, my friends, and myself. It has also taught me that the true measure of having traveled is not just in seeing beautiful places or collecting experiences. It is in learning to sit with discomfort and confront the uncomfortable, even as I delight in the beautiful. It is allowing both to coexist and wrestle eternally within you so as to expand your understanding and appreciation of life.
Quiet hours of reflection at the park, the beach, and in church have allowed me to find this balance. Likewise, People-watching has awakened me to the beauty of sonder, the awareness that every stranger around me lives a life as vivid and complex as my own. This recognition has added both individual and collective depth to every encounter I have had, here and at home.
I cannot speak to what life will look like when I return to the States, or even a month after that. But what I do know is that there is a deep reassurance in staying grounded in what is, right now, today. In all that is to be enjoyed, and all that is to be mourned. Always holding hope that things will work out for the better, whether you are there when they happen or not.
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