After a secondment

It has been a while since I have posted here for my invisible audience who might well know me, or not.

The holiday I enjoyed this summer of 2017 was tremendously nourishing. It was almost a full ten weeks. During that time I read and rested well. I completed much good work and gained some decent fitness. I saved some money and felt myself well worthy of the thousands of pounds that I earned doing so.

And now?

I feel myself facing particular pressures of finance and the future: of what I might be doing here, the marinating foreboding that coats my heart with uncertainty and chains me to some kind of stasis.

Some things in school seem to take undue energy from me.

I am skilled in some ways. I am well read and able to speak reasonably well. I work hard. My health is decent enough. I have some good skills with people. I am relatively free.

I have significant flaws. I stumble over words. I can be..

Today was a decent day. I thought a little more clearly, I read and I saw friends. 

A Ten Week Holiday Ahead

It is almost four years, now, since I moved abroad.

My blog shifted itself from the seeking of some spiritual solace and nourishment to the acknowledgement of love. The idealistic naivety of my forays was worthwhile, if painful.

And now?

Facing up to what I am like, with writing

Morning all,

This year I have enjoyed many small triumphs. Not least I am slightly healthier. The calmness of my stomach, belying the roundness of my belly, means that my mind is somewhat than it was before.

I think that the calmness is partly because my mind has enjoyed some of the relaxation from before; the games, the dreaming, and the reading. I spoke at length with a friend who has some rather different political views. He was not a troll, although he spoke in favour of several right wing policies. Such conversation got me thinking:

I am resolutely moderate, not least because I am suspicious of the confidence of those who can pin their flags to the mast of political party affiliation. Quite simply there are some dominant expectations:

a) That I will be liberal and left-wing. I have very little social capital, and little economic capital (although that is somewhat changing with the tremendous niche in life I enjoy now).
b) That I will vote based upon what is best for me.
c) That I might vote for an entire party based on core issues only (such as tuition fees).
d) That to troll the public discourse in Western democracy is hilarious, on both sides.

There is a certain cynicism that casts itself over my eyes when I consider the political systems in the land where I was born. I guess this is what I believe:

a) A government is needed that prizes some kind of values and vision long-term. Real-Politik (making political decision on how to solve problems on a pragmatic basis) is not something to be entirely discounted at judicious times, but it is a dangerous way of leading a country.
b) Governing, by its nature, begins to lose nuance as policies are filtered down through their enactions. What might seem reasonable in the policy room, such as taxing those with more rooms in their houses, becomes monstrous when poor OAPs lose their savings to keeping a boxroom upstairs. Therefore, there is a need to high intelligent, conceptual folk working in positions of governance.
c) Yet saying that, we need people who are decisive. Is it possible to be decisive yet conceptual?

And it is that point in which I face up to what I am like. I am not decisive. I am unduly conceptual, happy and willing to be and to think, only desiring to emerge into the world when I finally have created some sense of my inner landscape. And yet I tell my students most days that it is the enaction on the external world where perception and narrative both seem to become most important.

What is my narrative? I am even creating it? If so, who is listening? Is this blog an attempt to create a narrative?

My narrative is not entirely stalled. It is one of a man who enjoys something of the world around him.

I am soon to leave this place for my summer holidays. Like in Vietnam, I desire to do something worthwhile. I desire to write, and to read. I will probably head to South East Asia. I am thinking about Japan.

Here are some ideas:
a) Thailand (for cheapness).
b) Cambodia (for cheapness, and for reading).
c) Vietnam (already been).
d) South Korea
e) Malaysia
d) Philippines
e) Japan -  flight is 700 pounds or so.

I still really have no idea of where I want to go. The context tours looks interesting, however.

I really think that I want to figure out my finances though. I did not purchase a HTC vive. I am travelling. It seems a massive expense. But is it? I need to figure these things out.

Properly.

For now, though, I should read. That is enough facing up, without actually doing so!

Another come-back day

And so yesterday I ate three smoothies of vegetables, and well elsewhere. The day was marked by waking up at 2am (this morning) with the need to eat two chocolate bars. It appears my addiction to sugar is not slight.

Yesterday I experienced the presence of two whirlpool workers who gave me what I thought was terrible advice. I am without a fridge that freezes, but that is surely a small point of consideration. It is one of the small domestic hassles of poor service, and poor care, that makes me feel I need to push and cajole for basic attention. It is tiny, but no less frustrating because of that.

Yesterday I managed to play football for 90 minutes. It was good. I felt good. I got a few kicks, and strained my leg again, but not too badly. Since I have returned two days ago, I have felt really rather healthy in comparison. Hopefully, more vegetables and less sugar will leave me with more energy.

I did not really quite finish planning a lecture I need to deliver soon. But I am happy enough, nevertheless, with the quiet direction my mind is taking these current days. I intend to see my friend and take some coffee and time together.

Finally, in the name of comfort, I am considering purchasing an expensive pillow, and a decent acoustic guitar. While this might be money I will not recoupe, I think that I need to have something I can play.

I am also thinking about the chance to just read. 

First 'come back' day of the Holiday

And so last night I was meant to see a friend and, like so often, I didn't only just not go - I didn't tell my friend that I fell asleep.

I woke up today, desiring the boredom and spartan excitement that comes with discipline. I am 75kg, resolutely, with the lack of nutrients in my body telling as well.

I am wondering what kind of routine to live. I think that, rather than complain, I should accept and live the kind of life that will allow me to do more.

I am not happy with the kind of side of myself I have been showing. I need more energy. I need more energy here.

And so some tidying has been done. And I will see my friend soon. That should be enough. Ish.

I think there needs to be some stillness. Some quiet. Some reading in the moment.

And so I have tided my place, and I have begun to get some things in place. I need to appreciate that there is a time to do things. And that I have been far too hash on myself in regards to the timing of things. Procrastination is not a demon. Time to sit and reflect and enjoy is essential. To be too hard on oneself is foolish, and counterproductive.

And so near the end of the day I have purchased good food, and a blender. Hopefully I will feel very soon...

Returning from Holiday

I sit here now with strength more than expected from my holiday. I will make a coffee and porridge and will return - milk is needed.

It took some time but I did this.

And while I sit here with too little sleep, and a fridge that seems a little broken, I am happy enough with what I have, and with what I will do.

Completing a list is not what I should be doing... I am at the point now where I do not want to put a date on things like listening to podcasts.

What I absolutely realised this holiday is that I am not someone who really is able to leave the worthwhileness of my work. I need much time to sit and just be. And, I think, I need to begin to get rid off stuff and actually relax.

I also am looking at travelling in Japan. It will be expensive, but that is to be expected. I think, as before, just reading and being, is ideal.

I also want to at some point, today or tomorrow, write about my experiences reading. It is the experience of the mind, and even now, afterwards, that I seek. 

Post just before I left

Today I finish at school for the term; the spirit came from unusual places.

I lead as I might do: was it enough? More than some.

Heightened and widened space opens inside my chest: I am ready to travel. I see the smoky light of my flat cloud in from the unwashed window.

I am here.

I am to choose between a backpack and a pushbag. I will try the backpack.

I am taking an excellent tablet (my YogaPad), and a bluetooth keyboard. I considered purchasing a new notepad computer - thought against it. The truth be told, I think that this combination will be good enough for my purposes.

I am taking American dollars with me: I have about 250 pounds worth. That should be enough to tide me along initially.

I have travel insurance.

I have checked in online.

I have decent money, I have have helped friends, and I am ready to soon sleep.

I will only take one pair of shoes; walking boots. 

How much pack to prepare?

Here I am. I am a day from travelling, and I wonder whether I should bring my laptop, or something else, abroad.

I might even purchase one tomorrow, frankly.

I also am still deciding whether to take a backpack or a bag. I am thinking, for some reason, a backpack...

Travelling as a teacher

I am due to travel in two days. I am ready for it.

I remember the familiar fear of travelling in China; the fear of the unknown, and more. However, I have a reasonable hotel for the first few days. That is important. Much of the research I have done into travelling and the backpacker lifestyle talks of how tiring a shared room really is.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to provide something of a guide to those who might want to seek something in the way that I do.

To that end, I desire to travel, yet to keep teaching somewhat.

Talking to colleagues today, in loose terms, I heard of the gratuities that they expect to earn. That means something.

I also know that my vocation challenges those who teach with weary cynicism. Yet to show the best side of me is not a terrible challenge - it is a responsive way of being. It is a choice; not a repression of desires. I determine the best side of me.

And so, what do I need to travel on this trip? I am going for 12-13 days

Passport
Bank cards (Middle Eastern and UK) - I need to tell my bank
Wallet
Sim Card (with temporary roaming?)
Travel Insurance
Workplace Medical Insurance

Clothes
T-shirts x
Trousers x3
Shirts x
Underwear and Socks x10 :-D
Shoes (flip flops; walking boots; shoes)

Toiletries
Toothpaste + Toothbrush
Shaving equipment
Meds

Electronics
Kindle
Lenovo Tablet...
Headphones (bluetooth? wired?) I am worried about them being stolen - wired earphones...
Rubbish Lenovo tablet or Surface Pro... I think that the Surface Pro will allow me to work. However, there are issues taking it. It is worth a huge amount. However, it is light.

I want to read this holiday. I want to experience my mind again.

I am currently looking at my low-fi Lenovo notebook: hopefully I can make it work well enough to install office et al.

I want to be inside Vietnam, and reading. We will see... The balance between travel by foot, and checking out things via Trip Advisor, will be interesting.

A lifestyle for fourteen days

At this moment I am sat in a cluttered apartment; the items placed around me flow in still longing of the unusual mix of love and compulsion, of both marking and consuming, sat in both dry and stick surfaces on the table around this huge screen and stark lamp.

I am ready to walk soon.

The day ahead stretches on with almost thirty tasks on my to-do list. That is a rhythm that has been familiar for a time.

The Christian Anglo-European mindset that determines my language, as well as the past that I have experience so profoundly, sees the idea that I should suffer some pain of work and responsibility in this life for the benefit of something more later still besets me.

Yet the besetting of my spirit is still ideal.

I live in a place now that is naked of its treating of me as a means to an end. And why not? It is a place that rewards me well financially. It is not overtly mean. Compared to my experience in the North of England, it is easy.

Let me say this: I had no assets and an overdraft in my mid-20s. I had no connections and only my mind, and my reading and writing. I had some culture. And now? Four years into travelling abroad I have cleared my student loan debts (the product of a thoughtless following of expectation to which I still somewhat subscribe...), have a small car I have almost paid off, and enjoy tens of thousands of pounds of savings. From where I have come from, that is a life-changing sum of money.

Moreover, the money I expect to receive when I leave this school in the form of a gratuity, and the wages for time not worked afterwards (the holidays and more!) to be tens of thousands as well, and tax-free.

This sum of money is life-changing, especially if I seek to live cheaply for a while.

One thing that I come to realise about my spirit is that I am eternally restless. I chose to not just be. The modifer there is effectively the very - 'just'. Is that my spirit, or is that how my mind connects with the brutal 'otherness' of the isolated Western world in which I find myself?

I have thought about how I connect with the world - of by its nature writing in this anonymous blog of how I do not enjoy a fulfilling outlet for expression and connection at this time.

There are real considerations to be made about how I live, and by what I bring to this world. But, in the meantime is this: I have earned this holiday. When I first moved abroad, I found myself in a relationship very quickly. my holidays were determined for years afterwards. My last holiday in Canada was fruitful for my spirit. I also chose another one in which I experienced, as well in Xmas in which I enjoyed too. I then saw my mother in February here. And now? Vietnam.

It is monstrous how my mind reduces itself to a confining falsehood. I want to just be. To become a conduit, a conscious accepter of how this body and brain are being.

Seeking Again

Ten days after last writing I have felt, for some time, an increasing sense of my own worth.

Despite the obvious angst and uncertainties, I have always retained a sense of earnest dignity. My lack of social connection and power has meant that I have learnt to restrain the expression of this with some of those around me. Growing up in a poor Midland town, I realised that there was a kind of social power in the crass vitality of the conversation of some. In my school, such groups were ubiquitous. I found myself with the choice of spending my time with them, or walking.

I chose walking.

That is a choice I will be able to make again.

There is one kind of English teacher I know about: the teacher of the soul and spirit. Every student needs some kind of guidance. The ideal teacher is open about their values, and avoids bias. The functional English teacher is simply not one I recognise: they are no teacher for me. They are a teacher by their given profession on tax returns; they are teacher by fitting into bureaucratic systems; and they are a teacher by perhaps a reluctant self-definition. Yet they are not a teacher I recognise.

The English teacher I recognise is a Byronesque figure. They live the literature they write and read, and they decide each year whether they will still teach.

Sitting here in a worn Ikea chair in my Ikea-branded apartment out in the desert makes me realise that my life could take different directions. I am weary, but not yet frayed.

Last night I sat with friends and realised the delightful conversation of wise minds. Old souls, edged with experience.

The searing reality of relentless mornings waking up to responsibility has not made me weak. It has not blasted my mind. Only made my hair a little grey, my muscles softer, and my eyes a little dim.

Yet they are still sharp. My breath still burns these lungs, and my feet need to walk.

I have loved, and loved much. My heart has calmed somewhat, and this self here has settled back into the seat of my ampitheatred heart to see what others may do.

My loneliness here is privileged. I have the money, time, health and mind to travel as once I desired. I will seek again.

A surprising dislocation

At this time I find myself sat with a smaller number of people than before. The lack of space to interact with other teachers is telling on my mind; there is nothing really innately wrong with these people - they are just a small group with a conversation that is about things immediately in front of them.

I found in another school that I was able to sit with a variety of staff: this was a delight. The dynamics of this played especially well. And now? I sit in small rooms, walking backwards and forwards in an air-conditioned corridor. That is something that affects the spirit.

There is something about this that is unduly small.

I stand outside and watch.

I still need to secure where I will stay...

Booked some time

I have booked some time in Vietnam; 12 days.

I booked with Emirates, and I am staying in a mid-range hotel at the price of 30 pounds a night.

I have the opportunities to pay much less (to pay that for the total). However, I am used to a standard of comfort that is far greater than what I done before.

I feel that I want to be a backpacker over the summer. But now is, I feel, not necessarily the time.

I am tired from the day. But satisfied, nevertheless.

This Rhythm

I have been teaching abroad now almost three and a half years. I have three months until terminal exams, and then the wind down/up of the year. In that time I have experienced nourishment; I have also distracted myself terribly.

Increasingly, though, I am listening to my internal rhythms. I look at myself - my face, my voice, my clothes, the running stumble of my emotional gamut - and just look. 

These rhythms I feel now are not in step with those around me. They drop away. The speed up. 

I feel this: that in those three years I have paid off my student loan. I have an incredibly healthy amount of money saved, and much more money that can be added to that pile. That pile will be useful later, and it gives me options. 

At my age now of being in my mid-30s, resolutely (and willingly) without a partner, I seek something else. I seek a different kind of rhythm to that which I am experiencing now. While my mind, perhaps bound with foolish heuristics, avoids holidays under the auspices of either saving money (worthy), or because of the risks of travel. I have also, in the past, struggled with not working over the course of the holidays. 

No more. 

I want to visit a country like Vietnam. I want a cheap(ish!) hotel. I want to read the spirit of the country, and to read and walk a different rhythm. I want to be. I want to be as I did when I was twenty one and ready for the world, and to walk it to the beat of my blood. 

I want to love. I want to be. I want to live. I want to experience. I want to love. 

These connections come first by looking at the kind of connections that I see available to me. There are many. I reject some. I reject many. They ebb and flow, as they rightly should do. 

There is far more to all this. I have opportunity and time. I need to work out how much it would cost to live, and to live.

I feel myself moving towards a year out of teaching. I want to move towards the reading, writing, and experiencing. I want to do so without entirely moving out of the institutionalised life. This Easter holiday, I intend to seek nine days of this. 

From tomorrow, I will plan.  

This is what I listen to these days.

Seeking a different rhythm

It has been a long time since I wrote in here; perhaps half a year.

Since then my landscape has changed. I have realised just how busy the demands of a teacher, standing in front of dozens of people each day, can be on your mind. It saps the perception, narrowing it somewhat. My health is not great either, with little exercise being sought smartly on my part. Yet I know this; I know this and intend to do something about it.

My ambition at this time is to travel to different countries, and to read the literature of those places. In doing so, I want to read the spirit of that culture - to feel its perception, to experience its history. Of course, I should rightly question whether reading the perception of a few authors can capture the spirit of a place, with its physicality and people and taste. And to that I say this - the holidays I see before me talk of staying in a hotel, and travelling out to see elephant sanctuaries and the like before returning to eat a buffet meal. A few bars are experienced along the way, with maybe a film or a tour further outwards. All worthy; all containing things that I would rather do differently.

For me, I wonder how much of the culture of Britain that I experienced in my time there. Yes, I lived there 28 years. I read about it, and experienced it. I experienced Northern culture, with all its raucous vitality. I experienced the quiet desperation of poverty, and the dislocated possibilities of an educated man without connections. Friends and communities I made, made me. I realise that now. And in their successes and tribulations I sit here in my apartment now, sandy windy roaring outside, and purse my lips in wry tightness.

I have met many people as well. In a place like this, as transitory as it might be, people might lack a sense of who they might be. The dominant culture I experience is that influenced by the best marketing of the best bars and brunches, as well as the slivers of style needled into the joint minds I feel at break each day. There is no little disaffection here, I must admit, but also no little possibility.

Time is not all that I need. In that time is a perception of what I am doing. That perception is something that, if I am wise enough, I can control.

There is a peculiar angst that I sense in my colleagues and those around me. It is of purpose. It is of why we are teachers, and why we do what we do. It affects me. It most certainly must affect them. The angst seems to be this:

a) We are in a place where we can earn much money. I earn more in a week here than I earned in a month when I first started teaching.
b) We are in a place where we can save life-changing amounts of money.
c) We are in a place that is especially transitory - 90% of the population will not stay here, nor will they purchase property here.
d) We are in a place where the ex-pat population are involved in particularly commercial industries. This also has a particular spirit, and one which I feels encourages a perception honed for effectiveness (and why not?).
e) Vocation seems to be last on the lips of many people. We are to perform a functional job, and to be somewhat clinical and measured in our response and our relationships.

In being in this, I have discovered my absolute need for vocation. Yet, also, I have found that there is much goodness in this culture; there is much wisdom in being smart in working, and in dedicating emotional and logistical energy to tasks in a measured manner.

At this time I have been given planning that is 'pretty much' done for me. I am to follow a set series of lessons via PowerPoints, and those are based upon assessment criteria. Having planning completed for me is ideal; it certainly saves time. And yet there are nuances of planning that I desire: conceptual points of being that I want my students to appreciate. Such conceptual maps, such as those spoken by Gary Snapper, are in short supply. Do they exist? Am I to make them?

I am certain of one thing though: this week I am to be observed many times. When I am seen, I want to teach from my spirit. To do this, I need to teach something that I feel is inspirational. To plan that requires an intensity of awareness that frankly is not always possible. The relentlessness of planning and teaching and being can leave us weary. Yet I still have energy at this time.

And with the demands of planning opening in the short moments ahead of me, I want to declare that this Easter holiday (ready in a mere month) will be a holiday where I sit, and read, and drink and write the spirit of a culture. I will see if I can discover, if I can forge, different rhythms and connections. In the dark stillness of this day, looking out the smudged windows of this high-rise apartment, I sense my spirit can do that.