Saturday, April 17, 2010

The First Few Months


It took a lot of adjusting to make things work here in Taiwan. Perhaps the greatest adjustment was of my expectations. I guess I thought I'd be practicing Kung Fu with Bruce Lee's teachers in the morning, followed by a chi enriching breakfast with a descendant of Lao Tsu as we discussed the finer points of un-naming the named and what truly is the Universal Tao. After that I would meditate for a few hours and clear my head before writing some of my soon-to-be-released best selling novel. In the afternoon I would wander into a school and play with some kids for a while before clocking off and heading into an opium den to transcend the night away...

In fact, my head couldn't get itself around what it meant to be a teacher and I ran into a wall of overthought and insomnia. Though I had lots of time to myself, I spent most of it dreading the night's classes and entertaining the many ways in which I could fail in my tired mind. I couldn't find the off-switch, but somewhere in there also lost the on-switch.

What was it he said in Fight Club? With insomnia you're never really asleep and you're never really awake. That's how I felt. If I did get to dream, I dreamt of teaching. It was a head-fuck. And, ultimately, it was just boring.

Fortunately, if there's one thing you can rely on, it's change. And in time, things changed a great deal...

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