Choice

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of Choice and how it pertains to our lives.  To me, it seems to be one of the most underutilized coping mechanisms people have.  Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are constantly making choices all day every day.

Privilege of course does play a part in some choices.  Certainly, those of us who are born into privilege have more options to choose from in regard to what we realistically can attain in this life.  My decision to be an English teacher in South Korea is a life option that has no equivalent for my Korean counterparts over here – which is absolutely something I think every ESL teacher needs to be well aware of.  Nevertheless, there are indeed choices that everyone in this world can make.

Regardless of one’s place of origin, we can always choose how to react to any given situation.  Life is full of experiences.  Some are dull, others exciting.  Some are fantastic, others are shitty.  Whatever the experience, we always have the ability to choose how we perceive it.  We can get lost in the dull, shitty side of our experiences, or we can make a conscious effort to search for the silver lining.  It’s a bit strange at first, but if you make a conscious effort at it, it can become second nature.

A couple weeks ago while longboarding at the weekly skate night in Ulsan, I took a bit of a fall, busting open my chin and breaking a tooth in the process.  Strangely enough, the first thought that ran through my head after the fall was, Hmm, I’ve never been to the ER in Korea before. I wonder what it will be like!  Soon enough however, I was bumming about all the medical bills I was racking up.  So, I decided to treat the whole thing as a cultural experience.  I began to actually get a little excited on my trips to the dentist because it was a chance to practice Korean.  On each trip, I tried to make mental notes of the differences between American and Korean dentists and doctors.  And you know what, soon enough I wasn’t thinking much of the medical bills anymore.  Obviously, I would still prefer not to have fallen that night, but at least I got something out of the experience besides spending a bunch of money.

To say it succinctly,

Shit happens in life.  Everyone is aware of that.  It’s how you react to the shit happening that really matters.

읽어 주셔서 감사합니다!

The Good Old Days

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of The Good Old Days.  Looking through old pictures on Facebook or listening to certain albums always evoke certain memories of a time when things were so much easier, simpler, happier – The Good Old Days.

Of course, you rarely recognize those days when you’re in them.  There’s always day-to-day concerns to consume your thoughts in those Good Old Days.  It’s only sometime after, when a certain happy memory pops in your brain that you think, damn, those really were the good ole days.  I’m no exception to this either.

Still, I remember having a spout of the Good Old Days nostalgia the other day when suddenly the whole irony of situation struck me; There I was, thinking about some joyful time in my past, as I was living in KOREA!

Then I realized, I am in the Good Old Days!  Teaching in Korea is great, but at the end of the day it is a job just like any other, and getting bogged down in the day-to-day concerns of it can make you forget where you are sometimes!

So, if you’re reading this, at whatever point in your life you currently find yourself, take a moment and try to find those future Good Old Days in your current situation!

Home

Going home after a stint abroad is always interesting, but it seems to get easier with each consecutive trip.  It’s often a bit bewildering, coming from a place where you’re never quite 100% sure what’s going on and arriving in a place where suddenly everything is (for the most part) oddly familiar.

In a lot of ways that’s nice.  As a tall white dude with long hair and a mustache, I stick out in Korea.  No matter where I go here, I’ll always be on display for better or worse.  I can’t tell you how many times a student has come up to me at school and said something along the lines of, “Teacher! I saw you at the store yesterday!”  I’ve come to expect and kind of enjoy the curious stares I get, but it’s still a little unsettling knowing that I’ll always be scrutinized any time I leave my house.

I lose all that when I come home.  I’m once again just another millennial hipster.  I can walk down the street and know that no one is watching me, wondering who I am and what I’m doing there.  It’s refreshing, really.

In other ways, coming home is indeed tough.  I’ve had a year’s worth of exciting and new experiences that I would like to share, but the reality is that most of them will go untold.  Everyday life in Korea simply isn’t relevant or interesting for most people back home.

And I’ve discovered that’s quite alright.

If there’s one thing I took away from this two-week trip back home, it’s that friends and family back home have been living their lives as well; they also have a year’s worth of different and exciting experiences that they’d like to share with me.

When you live abroad, oftentimes a sense of superiority can develop with regards to people back home.  Indeed, our current culture glorifies the whole ‘ditch your corporate job and travel the world’ mindset.  People back home are just sheep following an established order, but not you, adventurous world traveler!  I sometimes fall into this flawed line of thinking; the fact is, it’s hard to not feel at least a little special doing what I do.

But if there’s one thing living abroad has taught me, it’s that there is no right or wrong way to live your life.  People taking that corporate job or not leaving the hometown are living life just the same as me, only the experiences differ.  Thus, while the things I’ve seen and done in Korea are immensely exciting to me, there are also countless other immensely exciting things going on back home in other people’s lives.

Life happens back home just it happens over here.  It took quite a while for me to fully grasp this simple truth, but those past two weeks really carved it in stone for me.

And so, I’m incredibly grateful for the amount of time I’ve been able to spend abroad over my short 25 years thus far, and even more grateful for a supportive family.  It was indeed, a very good vacation!