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.