18th Century wooden house
Tartu is not one of the oldest towns in the world, but everywhere you go, there are references to the first millennium of the common era, remnants of walls built to protect various peoples and places, and much of the town dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
I too am old, although not on this scale. At the university with my 20-something classmates studying Estonian (eesti keel), I feel old. Mentioning things that happened in the 1970s is ancient history to them.
Although the town and the buildings are very old (väga vana), Tartu is young and lively. No doubt the presence of multiple universities and thousands of students helps create this vibrant, active city.
Photo of old town Tartu and the Emojogi river
Amidst all this liveliness, I feel unmoored. I’m not who I was without the stories of my life. Yet I’m not a new person either. Sixty plus years of experience, education, and community activism have been erased. I am just an old woman trying to learn a new language. While I meet many young people on this adventure, some by choice, some due to war, I feel alone in my age bracket, floundering to find my footing.
C.G. Jung argues that at my age I should be working on integration between the inner and the outer, my journey towards death, and the opportunity to see and perhaps fulfill my destiny. The turn should be inwards, towards the mysteries of life and yet…
I come from a culture obsessed with the young, the new, and the shiny. I carry this baggage in me even though intellectually I reject it. I am caught between the journey I thought I was taking and the one life handed me. In between these two places is the life I wanted to live.
When I first visited Estonia in 2017, I was transported into an imaginal memory reel of my father’s life and tribulations, which gave birth literally and figuratively to my life. These challenges created both my drive to treat life as an adventure and the impediments to my desired experiences. Now that I am living here, the past is not some sentimental journey but rather a passage into the future.
Each day in Tartu, I awake excited to learn, explore, and expand my horizons. To step outside the bling of the USA and the constant battle over money. Here is a post-Soviet, post-occupation world that I am struggling to read and understand. Today it is almost five weeks that I have been in Tartu and perhaps my zip zip attitude of wanting to understand it all is holding me back from experiencing it all. No wonder I keep getting slapped down.
