The Fellowship Experience Begins

This weekend, the Bush Foundation is hosting a retreat for the 2015 class of Bush Fellows. The retreat is meant to allow our class to meet and get to know one another and to aid in finalizing our fellowship plans and the work we'll do over the next two years.

My intention is to write more about all the facets of this experience as it happens. What I am learning quickly is that this fellowship is going to challenge me in ways that I've never really been challenged before. That, of course, is to be expected, but on day one, the challenges are flooding in.

It is fair to say that my worldview lacks a breadth of cultural and worldly experience. That's one way of saying that my being white and growing up in a community with very little ethnic and cultural diversity has shaped me to think and act in certain ways. Nothing earth shattering here, but after day one, I have already been placed face-to-face with very different life experiences.

The Fellowship experience is already enriched because of this very introduction. I am embracing this wholeheartedly and I look forward to how it will impact my thinking and my actions.

My experience with addiction has permitted me to think about my human place in the world, but I can tell that something was missing from that inspection. The next two years will be rewarding for so many reasons, but this aspect just might be of greatest import.