Tag Archives: Reflection

On My Mind

Cancelled

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There were enough signs that aligned (or didn’t) that we knew before we admitted we knew: We would not be travelling to Peru as we planned. It was 4am when we first broached the subject and 11am when we made the decision. We’d booked the trip six months earlier and had talked about it for at least six months before that. But the universe just didn’t turn the way we needed it to turn.

We cried, realizing we were giving up on a dream. There will be other dreams, of course, but dreams are the things that grab hold of us and that’s what makes them so hard to let go.

Over the subsequent days, I realized that I was still sad. I woke up in the mornings wishing I were still asleep, not ready to face yet another day here, when everything I had been looking forward to was somewhere else.

We’ve gone out every day and watched spring coming into full force. I’ve cooked some nice things.

My favourite area in Weimar is the forest close to our flat and I brought my journal there one day. It helps me breathe a little more easily.

When life doesn’t go according to plan, it provides us all sorts of opportunities to realign and readjust. This is a chance to look at my own behaviour and actions in the face of a disappointment and behave differently next time. That’s real life, and there will be a great deal more of it that does not go according to plan.

It its own messy way, that’s what makes it beautiful.

Education

No Straight Lines

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Beginning at the parking lot and continuing along the walking trail leading to my favourite climbing spot are whimsical painted stones giving life advice. One that I particularly like reads, in translation, “The crooked tree enjoys life. The straight tree becomes a board.”

I have to smile every time I see this modified teaching from Daoist philosopher Lao Tzu. Indeed.

Consider an individual who carves their own path versus one who unquestioningly follows a straight line. Think of creatives, often revered for their skills, who report having had difficulty fitting in. There are whole communities of “alternatives” who are so similar to one another as to not be “alternative” at all. As an educator, I find this important to keep the spectrum of difference in mind in working with students. To some extent, I need them to “play the game” of school because of the way society is structured, but there is wiggle room between adherence to instructions and stamping out individuality.

I can see my life path reflected in the saying, too. I spent my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood occupied with, out of a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, what I was “supposed to” be doing. I had a plan and followed it, pretty predictably, until I didn’t. When I stopped the relentless, goal-oriented drive towards some imagined end, I realized that I didn’t actually want what the end had come to symbolize. I’d foregone the opportunity to “take chances, make mistakes, and get messy” in the words of Ms. Frizzle, everyone’s favourite science teacher, and came a little late to self-discovery.

But I got there, which is what had me in the forest climbing rocks in the first place.

This particular sign is placed so that you catch a glimpse of it on your way into the forest and see it full on when leaving. A little something to think about on the drive back home. I walked that way once with a friend whose oldest son is a good example of the crooked tree. He does not fit into any model called typical and things are hard for him that are not hard for everyone. But he can carry on a conversation like an adult, has genuine interests, and is afraid of nothing. My friend and I stopped together at the tree. Neither of us needed to say any more.

Thüringer Wald, Bad Tabarz, Germany – April 2024
Germany

Blink

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My grade seven students were surprised to find that class had already ended, shocked by the observation made earlier in the lesson that it had been a year and a half since they had completed the important exhibition that concludes grade five.

Time is funny like that.

I first moved overseas ten years ago.

My then-boyfriend and I got on a plane and slept better on the flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, the second leg of our journey, than we had in the nights leading up to our departure. We landed in Malaysia knowing nothing about what we were doing, I realized later, and it’s a good thing, too. Had we known how much we didn’t know, we never would have gone.

I’ve been much more prepared for subsequent moves and I can only shake my head at everything that went wrong that first time. Sometimes I ask myself why I hadn’t simply spent a little more time on the internet doing some pretty basic research, but then I remember that the world was a different place ten years ago. Information was not expected to be at our fingertips, so we didn’t spend much time looking. Unlike today, a world in which we are paralyzed by the amount of available information, I trusted what I was told and moved on.

Considering the ten years since getting on that plane, I cannot be more grateful for not knowing, for not having asked, for letting blissful ignorance guide me in the direction of what could logically be considered a stupid decision. Shortly before departure, I learned that my boss had quit, and found out upon arrival that ground had not been broken for the promised staff apartments and that the school itself was a hard-hat zone without consistent running water. Had I walked into those conditions today, I would have headed straight back to the airport.

But hindsight is twenty-twenty, and most of us who arrived were optimistic to a fault. It’s kind of a beautiful trait, actually, because it kept us going. We said “yes” again and again when everything around us was screaming “no”.

Optimism or utter foolishness, depending on how you look at what happened next.

In the end, my then-boyfriend and I moved (well-prepared!) to different countries, staying together for a year only to separate upon reuniting the next. Subsequently, I spent a few years deciding who I wanted to be now that I’d grown up. Armed with experience and facing a dearth of options, I took the only one there was: A small school had offered me a job, a small school in a small town that, according to my scouring of Google Maps, had a climbing hall. The news everywhere said that a pandemic was a bad time to find a new job, so the only logical answer was to take it.

In just over a month, I’ll take the German citizenship test for the chance that I’ll apply for citizenship here one day, a sure sign that I’ve decided to call this place home. For this, I can thank learning the language and falling in love with a local. We laugh when telling people about the dot on the map that brought us together, and remain in awe of the travel experiences that had us, for years, in the same corners of the world mere months apart.

I remain astonished at how small the world is, and I think I moved abroad to live that for myself. I signed and then broke a two-year contract, and then I blinked and ten years went by.