In Spain, rebuffing the habits of our bustling American lifestyle

SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain -- Our Richmond planner and Spidercard might not weigh much, but after half a semester abroad without them, the lightness is unreal.

A few days into our program here, one of my Richmond classmates and I were walking home from school when we turned around and saw the group we had set out with was 50 feet behind. We'd just begun to congratulate ourselves on the efficiency of our gait, when the reality of our condition hit us hard. We were race-walkers. Heads down, New-York-City-style speed-walkers. And that was one sport I'd never wanted to try.

We took a few seconds to absorb our surroundings -- the sun was dancing across the turquoise river that was leading us to an afternoon at the beach. There was nothing to be done and nowhere to be. What was the rush?

We struggled for not only the rest of the walk, but for the rest of the month to adapt to the stroll and break our habit of gluing our eyes to the ground the moment we moved forward. To the shaking heads of San Sebastian natives, we'd catch ourselves weaving through pedestrians and trying to cross the street at red lights. I even ran into a shoulder-high roadblock ... two days in a row.

Other signals of the extent to which we'd been pre-programmed to always be accomplishing something surfaced when another Richmond classmate confessed he felt guilty not having work to do every day, and another admitted she could actually sleep at night.

Although we are learning from class lectures and the intermittent homework assignments, there has been no equivalent to nightly Boatwright sessions. A couple of exercises and a final exam or paper. When I asked a professor if I could take my pre-semester language course exam early because I was traveling that weekend, his response was, "No me importa. Just do it by February."

There have certainly been times when I've missed the efficiency of the United States, as when I was on an airport shuttle that was content with traveling behind a tractor for a half hour and more concerned with taking stretching breaks than getting us to our flights on time. And we'd never allow a Richmond Airport in D.C., unlike when I flew into a "Frankfurt Airport" that was two hours from Frankfurt. I'd probably never have to spend a night on an airport conveyor belt because of bird trouble either.

I'll also never take my dryer or dishwasher for granted again, but it feels good to live under a different mindset. And I'm still in a first-world country. I can only imagine what other students are being exposed to in Africa or Latin America.

Although I'm mindful that in two months I'll be home, the lesson of the possibility of another way to live won't be irrelevant. In fact, considering what the state of the economy and my own bank account will be when I return, a new mindset will be essential.

So when my instinct was to be alarmed about the economy, a friend both caught me off-guard and reinforced my own new lesson when he said he was excited. The world financial system was not good, fair, nor honest, he said, and if our economy collapsed, a new and radically different system would not only be possible, but better.

Then he sent me a Google video called "Zeitgeist Addendum," which dissected our monetary system with the assertion that we've been living under a system of glorified slavery, oppressed by our obsession with the bottom line.

In enjoying my semester slightly detached from the bottom line mindset, I was intrigued by the film's solution of the Venus Project. Its goal is to abandon profit and competition for a high-technology, resource-based economy, reasoning that only technology can improve our lives through efficient resource use, not money, religion, nor politics.

Maybe Obama will offer some change, but if it's not enough, if my semester abroad has taught me one thing it's that a complete reprogramming needn't cause dread, but invigoration.

The film presses, "...we must be open to new information at all times, even if it threatens our current belief system... being wrong is erroneously associated with failure, when in fact, to be proven wrong should be celebrated, for it is elevating someone to a new level of understanding, furthering awareness."

My intention is not to dismiss our whole way of life nor Richmond's, as it has afforded me this opportunity to be abroad and enabled my understanding of key concepts in the video. But in receiving a college education we are in the top 1 percent of the world, so I hope that upon graduation we're not chasing money, since we're seeing it can't be relied on. Rather, I hope that we're not merely open to, but the drivers of development, and that we can be leaders in daring to know something different, innovative, better.