The least stress

Hello folks, 

I hope you are doing well on this early morning. For some reason my body feels rested, the stress of past years no longer firing my nervous system. 

I see a real need to promote my personal life. It is one thing to be this rested and happy with the level of work I am doing; it is another thing to make my personal life the emotional core of what I do. 

If I expect my partner to be themselves outside a corporate job, I should do the same. 

Read. Cafe. Watch cultural events.

Do these things. 

A new year with a little bug

Like the Queen's many birthdays I enjoy multiple new years as a teacher. 

I have made it, clocked this game. It is time to quietly quit. 

Exam results have been superb and I have proven to myself what I wanted to prove.

Play a wasteful game now - enjoy that imagination. 

More to come later. 

A holiday, and a start without the barriers

It is 4am and I am ready to walk on a new day. 

In 36 hours I will be travelling back to the UK, ready for the usual emotional showdowns, largely with myself. 

I worked hard for three months, perhaps four, to put in place systems that make life easier for me and others next year. 

Bingo barrier has now finished. 

The cosplaying chav has taken the circus to another kingdom. 

I am ready to step off that sand filled plane, command the legions of my mind, and feel the thighs strengthen with trust. 

The Last Week of the 17th Year

Yesterday during our academic awards I spoke with our departing students. Much emotional energy has been given - perhaps lost? - in the nurturing of those students. 

The pause now is problematic. I am used to burning with righteous intensity. 

Listening and reading is the plan now. 

Write, my son.  

The end of 5.5 weeks of mission-driven work: I told myself do no do too much.

I told myself do no do too much.  

Today is the last stretch of completing culture-building tasks. Weariness spreads from my stomach to my chest because I have walked to my limits. Little excess energy remains in my body. Only a minimum level of rest has been enjoyed.

Why am I tired? I challenged myself to rebuild our KS4 curriculum. I did it. It required hard and skilled work. With AI to guide me via expert books, I did it. Driven by similar feelings I had in Dubai those yeas ago, I did it.  

This journey of completion reminded me what it is to be a student again. Let's say I had fifteen poems to complete. The first took me many hours of refining and making. The last took me less than 25 minutes. The cycle finished strong, my expertise improving and refining each time. 

I feel confident that my work and leadership next year is more prepared than ever before. Prepared means freer.  

The cost of this journey is significant, though. My emotional and social life has shrunk somewhat in the demands of this length and intensity. My partner has been understanding. 

That I travelled so far and fast for so long motivated me to finish. I return from a dimension of monastic intensity to the low plains of school life. That is fine. I do not suffer emotive spikes as perhaps I once did.  I am happy with low emotional spikes, an embering fire in me now. 

Today I lead an exhibition with many visitors. I do not know how this might work exactly, but I have enough ideas, and enough plans. And I hope courage and thinking leads my heart to guide my mouth. 

It is an excitement to be leading this workshop today in front of so many. 

To see how far I have come pleases me. I thought from a young age that my 40s is when I would step into these positions. 

My fitness is returning. To sit in my imagination should be my next ambition.

  

Do not do too much

This morning I woke up at 5:15am. Apparently my sleep was 85. Since my 43rd birthday I have slept very well. 

Tiredness still weights down my guts, a dark and silty river. I sit and wait here, wondering, hoping - being! And I feel I am back. The man who might write and read - other more sober demands can begin to fall away. 

I have some money. Do something with it. Let's discuss. 

I discuss often with an AI my thoughts about the above. This diary is strange because it does not instigate different feelings from a different reader, who is me now. 

What is it about that child and his imagination that I wish to provoke, to capture, to validate? That first White Dwarf - of a grouping that validated such thought. A Screaming Bell, a Shadowsword. 

Is there the pressure of 'being the best' that comes from my heritage?

Below I will consider soon - a journey where I will describe these places: 

 I am of an age where I... want to speak to my younger self. What might I have done differently? 

1) What would I say to myself upon leaving university? What would I say about those first steps? 

2) What would I say to myself in my PGCE? 

3) What would I say to myself in St Augustine's school? As I prepared my classes. As I ground out the teaching? 

4) What would I say to myself in Beijing? In that first posting? 

5) Would would I say to myself in Dubai? 

6) What would I say to myself in Manila? In those initial years? 

 I am calm. I have enough, and enough safety nets to simply be. The clutter of my desk catches the flow of energy around me. 

Handling Chaos

For the first time in over a year I pause for the words I will say. With some trust, a thin scratch of trust, the right words might rise. The right words to make a situation occur might rise. 

Situations do not occur because of words, but rather because of choices. A choice can be made without thought, an icecream purchased because of an appealing colour. A decision instead demands more engagement, to weigh up the choices and to commit to an option. 

What chaos rises up within me? What systems and expectations do I meet outside my mind and body? Initially I wrote 'have outside my mind and body', but I meet them... why might I say 'have'? Perhaps my identity is more strongly made up of these systems, these social mores, than I hope. 

I can rarely just be with myself and my breath. 

I am excited to return to work, to teach and to read again. 

That excitement is not without fear though. I have been often driven by fear. 

As I opened a few documents about Real Writing, my stomach shifted, unsettled currents rushing through my rigorous chest. Does that have to be 'fear'? Do I suffer a fundamentally negative and fearful apprehension of my mind and past? 

I spoke to the AI for a few hours, downloading books on trust and sincerity. 

Letting the chaos of competing narratives debate in the unspoken narrative of my mind is an interesting thing to play with. Let us run with no music, again. Let the chaos compete with itself. 

Don't do too much

 Hi folks, 

1) Don't do too much.

2) Feel healthier. 

The above two things are my worthy ambitions. I will need to walk first though the two around me. 

ToK stuff can come tomorrow, if that. 

I played a game of 40k. I enjoyed it. That is enough for me. I loved my Drukhari. 

What do I intentionally focus on?

 So much of this focus is on the external validation of work.

The trees are moving if you wish to look long enough. How far might I climb up the tree before it egins to bend crazily towards the ground? Might I be flicked like a cataplut over the bounds of this condominium's porojettion? 

Did I dampen my inner life? Taht question does not make sense. It is a word outside the essence of my subconscious attempting to understand my subsonscious while outside. 

We travel into the fantastical depths of imagination. What we might find is uncertain, for it is s shifting forest, whether sands or rocks or tundra might form. Animals, folks, places. Might ait be possible to become lost in that part of the subconscious? 

From this age might I simply sit and see what occurs? 

There have been moments of stress with my mother and Grace whereby I wanted to respond differently, particularly with Grace. Can I raise some of these issues in a clamer way, steppign towards the tempest but being ablet o validdate it myself?

There was a point once whereby I validated my thoughts myself. Great times.