That single exchange set the tone for everything that followed, and it taught me something I had not expected to learn so early: that global citizenship does not begin with information. It begins with attention.
The Ignatian tradition names this movement clearly—context leads to experience, experience calls for reflection, reflection asks for action, and action, once taken, must be evaluated before we return again to context. It is not a straight line toward some final understanding. It is a circle we keep walking. I had studied this as a method. In Rome, I began to live it as a posture—one I now recognize as the actual shape of responsible global citizenship, not a theory to be cited but a discipline to be practiced.
Two moments in the program made this concrete. One workshop trained us to speak across conflict without needing to win it—to enter disagreement not as a contest but as an act of listening, trusting that the space between two people is usually narrower than fear makes it seem. Another invited us past introductions into honesty—into the real material of who we are: our families, our fears, our unfinished griefs, our reasons for wanting to build something that matters. I sat across from people from different countries, different faiths, different economic realities, and found that our concerns were not so different after all. Dignity. Belonging. The desire to be useful to something larger than ourselves. Global issues stopped living in headlines and policy briefs. They began living in people's stories, told plainly, across a table.
The places we visited carried their own weight. Standing beneath a ceiling painted centuries before I was born, I understood that tradition is not simply something we study from a distance. It is something we inherit, and something we are asked to answer. The formation Rome offered was not only intellectual. It asked me to be attentive, compassionate, and willing to serve—not someday, but now.
What moved me most, though, was smaller than any workshop. Across several conversations that week, different people told me, in different ways, that what I already do is enough—that I do not need to keep earning my belonging through output. One of them said it to me plainly, without qualification: that I simply needed to keep doing what I was already doing. I did not know how much I needed to hear that until I heard it.
I returned home without a new strategy. What I carry instead is confirmation—that the work I have already begun, building spaces where people who feel unseen can be seen, is not a smaller version of global citizenship waiting to grow into something larger. It is what global citizenship looks like when it is practiced honestly, at the size a person can actually be responsible for. I do not have to solve everything to begin. I only have to build from the place where what I care about meets what I can actually do—with presence, with humility, and with love as the reason I show up, not the reward I receive for arriving.
