After the training where we were treated more like elementary school students than the teachers of them, my fellow ALTs and I were burned out. Understandably so as the days of training were long and many of us, coming from overseas, were still adjusting our circadian rhythms. I needed some alone time to recharge after the whole week of social interaction(probably good for me in terms of personal development). Planning on spending the two days of hotel time in Ageo alone exploring and shooting pictures things changed when I was asked to spend some time with my fellow teachers. Having people asking me to hang out was like landing a crit with 1 percent crit chance, so I figured my time alone could wait till I was in Matsumoto. While some of my graduating class lived right down the street from each other I was a good two hours away by bullet train, so the chances of me regularly hanging out with anyone I had met over the last week were pretty low.
It was a shame because now I had friends from all around the world. A part of me thinks that the term “friend” is thrown around all too much now a days. Like Simon Sinek states, millennials have a lot of “friends”, but the depth of the relationships are all too thin and shallow. The contrasting part of my split nature lived in the world of Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, and some Eastern philosophies which state that every small moment and action carry significance. Much preferring eastern thought over the traditional western Christian view of the world, I enjoyed swimming in the duality of life. (Although I do like the way Alan Watts thinks of Christianity, and will have to read the bible on my own to come to a conclusion of how I feel about it.)
The thing that is most important in traditional eastern ways of thinking were the present. The sliver of time before the future and after the past, we live our life in a series of moments like frames in a film. I had regretted a lot of things about the past, the future left me anxious because there was a grand vision I was called to build, but the only frame I could modify was the one I was living in now. One of my heroes in life, Bruce Lee, places an emphasis of living in the now and honestly expressing one’s self. Learning to be honest with yourself at every present moment is more difficult than one might think. The light buzz of my phone brought me back from the existential void in my mind and into my body laying on a hotel room bed staring up at the ceiling.
Expecting to See my mom’s profile picture, I was surprised to see the the picture of a Buddha and two white guys standing in front of it.
“Let’s Go To Shibuya and Akihabara before meeting up with everyone else”
-Tom
