At long last, fall has blown into Yamaguchi-ken with a strong, swift sigh of relief. Thinking about it, it`s funny how in our time here the outside weather situation has become so clearly analogous with our ``inside situations.`` I think back, relucantly, to those stifling, steamy, unbearable few days after we had first arrived, when the heat and humidity pushed down on us relentlessly and once basic situations became impossibly complicated, and all we could manage to think about was how we were going to escape it all. It was hard to move at all during those days, much less 'experience Japan.' Then the heat would break occasionally and we`d be a little bit more comfortable making our way to the grocery store or the ATM, and we`d see glimpses of a life we would be able to bare. Then there were the inevitable storms, even a typhoon or two that barely missed us, that we didn`t fully understand but which left us cowering in our rooms, windows once again closed tight, thinking about the possibility for escape. Sometime in the middle of last month, I think, we started waking up in the mornings and there'd be this breeze blowing in through our windows that actually had a chill to it. We'd have to close up all the windows and began pulling our space heaters out of the closet. We had no idea what this sudden chill meant, but we were enjoying it.
It's turned out, and thank God for it, that fall here is just beautiful. Suddenly, we're walking around outside in relative comfort, taking newly discovered shortcuts to the grocery store, or choosing the long way because we felt like it and not because we were lost, happily choosing from a number of places where we wanted to go out to eat, even getting lost on purpose in our now quaint feeling little town. As I write there's one of those misty, Japanese rains falling outside my window, but it's no longer that sludge that Erin and I pushed our way through on our first night here. Now it's a familiar, cooling comfort, a good reason to finally stay in for an evening and appreciate our cozy little home. It's easy to forget sometimes, but the seasons will always change, wont they?
Of course, all of this slowing down and enjoying has left us with a bit more time on our hands to spend wondering why in the hell we decided to go through all of this in the first place. Let me be clear: we're not at home here. We enjoy ourselves in spite of the fact that we miss everyone all the time, we miss everything familiar, and we have our days where all we want is to be stuck in traffic on some familiar Indiana interestate before the sun comes up on our way to a job that's driving us crazy in America. So why are we here?
Japan was always just sort of the next thing we were going to go for, ever since we first had a friend who did the program up her graduation, while we were sophmores. We chose philosophy and theology majors without any career tracks in mind, basically to keep ourselves free to decide later on, and, it turns out, the JET program is somehow the most logical next step on the career path for a philosophy/theology major. In other words, hey, it's a job... Then there's the passion for travel and experiencing different cultures. Then there's the simple fact that there didn't seem to be anything better to do. Why not have the adventure of a lifetime? As so many of you have told me, "now's the time..."
All of this was good and fine throughout college. Adventure, exploration, etc. etc. Strangely, something started happening for Erin and I about January of last year. We started having thoughts of a family, of the importance of community, and we started talking about the meaningful types of adventure that can be had just by getting to know yourself and where you already stand more deeply. This was the beginning of a somewhat gradual shift in the way each of us thought about and valued ourselves and the world we live in. We were starting to take place and relationships far more seriously than we ever had before. We even started talking about farming as a possible expression of this thinking about life, and have talked about it only more seriously ever since.This is something I've since given quite a bit of thought, still not so much as it's due, and I hope to write about it at length another time. I'm only speculating, but I think this might be what some people are referring to when they sometimes talk about "growing up." Like I said, this change was ever so gradual and ever so quiet, but it was also quite obvious and many of you have probably heard one of us speak or write about it from time to time.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there's no way to tell which, this subtle, gradual change was happening right in the middle of the combination whirlwind/earthquake/typhoon that we usually just call life, and so we didn't really get much of a chance to pay it a whole lot of attention. In other words, this stuff started to come up for us right about the time we found out we were going to get interviews for the JET program... The conversation maybe went something like this: (last January) "Hey, Erin." "Yeah Isaac?" "I've been thinking about the value of community and deep pers...WHOAH HOLY CRAP JAPAN!? WHOAH!?? WHAT THE CRAP WE COULD GO TO FRICKING JAPAN OH MY GOD CAN YOU BELIEVE IT WE'RE GOING TO INTERVIEW TO LIVE IN JAPAN WITH THE JET PROGRAM!! WHOOOOAAAAHHHH!!!!" (eight months later, and in Japan...) "...onal reflection and really considering what is important in my life. I think maybe we should think about buying some land and... Wait a minute..."
So, that's something about how we ended up here and what we're doing (and not doing) in Japan. That's not to say, obviously, that our time in Japan is a waste. How could it be? It's just to say that, as will happen from time to time in life, our priorities didn't quite sync up naturally with our realities. We're making the most of it here, but all of this I think has only made it all the more difficult to adjust to life in Japan, right when we're starting to realize what it is that we want most out of our life in general... It has also, however, made our transition here all the more valuable. It's made us really scrutinize those values and think about what they truly mean and where they are coming from. Our core values are definitely something we take for granted living in the relative comfort of our native society. If you value something and you're in your own society, you go out and get it, or you don't. If you value something and you're in an entirely new and foreign society, you're a little bit stuck both ways... We can't just go help out a friend on a farm here, we can't just dig up a garden, we can't just sign up for crafts classes at the local civic center for a lot of reasons which are difficult to understand until you run straight into them. So we've had to get creative. We have to ask, what do these values mean to us and why do we hold them? Are they too important to wait? If so, how can we express them ASAP? Questions like these can only ever be a good thing. And we're definitely learning more about ourselves and our values than we've ever cared to before...
Long story just a little bit longer, as a result of this questioning, we've begun to find ways to live out our values in our life here in Japan. Erin, like always, is chipping away writing that awesome story that will someday be a an awesome book. She's also really building up "Erin's English Conversation School" and has six students this week, with more on the way. It seems like being self-employed is hella tight. I've befriended a gardening instructor at one of my agricultural high schools who pushes his high-school level English to very max to help me get involved with the fully functioning farm at the school. Tomorrow, he says, I will be onionman! Last week I was flowerman. And, finally, one of Erin's students RUNS A FRICKING FARM with her husband THAT TAKES INTERNS, and they both speak English! She's going to ask this week about how we can get out there as much as possible and help them out to learn from them...
So that's something like what's been going on here recently.
Thanks for listening! We'll keep you posted!
--
http://loveandengrish.blogspot.com/
It's turned out, and thank God for it, that fall here is just beautiful. Suddenly, we're walking around outside in relative comfort, taking newly discovered shortcuts to the grocery store, or choosing the long way because we felt like it and not because we were lost, happily choosing from a number of places where we wanted to go out to eat, even getting lost on purpose in our now quaint feeling little town. As I write there's one of those misty, Japanese rains falling outside my window, but it's no longer that sludge that Erin and I pushed our way through on our first night here. Now it's a familiar, cooling comfort, a good reason to finally stay in for an evening and appreciate our cozy little home. It's easy to forget sometimes, but the seasons will always change, wont they?
Of course, all of this slowing down and enjoying has left us with a bit more time on our hands to spend wondering why in the hell we decided to go through all of this in the first place. Let me be clear: we're not at home here. We enjoy ourselves in spite of the fact that we miss everyone all the time, we miss everything familiar, and we have our days where all we want is to be stuck in traffic on some familiar Indiana interestate before the sun comes up on our way to a job that's driving us crazy in America. So why are we here?
Japan was always just sort of the next thing we were going to go for, ever since we first had a friend who did the program up her graduation, while we were sophmores. We chose philosophy and theology majors without any career tracks in mind, basically to keep ourselves free to decide later on, and, it turns out, the JET program is somehow the most logical next step on the career path for a philosophy/theology major. In other words, hey, it's a job... Then there's the passion for travel and experiencing different cultures. Then there's the simple fact that there didn't seem to be anything better to do. Why not have the adventure of a lifetime? As so many of you have told me, "now's the time..."
All of this was good and fine throughout college. Adventure, exploration, etc. etc. Strangely, something started happening for Erin and I about January of last year. We started having thoughts of a family, of the importance of community, and we started talking about the meaningful types of adventure that can be had just by getting to know yourself and where you already stand more deeply. This was the beginning of a somewhat gradual shift in the way each of us thought about and valued ourselves and the world we live in. We were starting to take place and relationships far more seriously than we ever had before. We even started talking about farming as a possible expression of this thinking about life, and have talked about it only more seriously ever since.This is something I've since given quite a bit of thought, still not so much as it's due, and I hope to write about it at length another time. I'm only speculating, but I think this might be what some people are referring to when they sometimes talk about "growing up." Like I said, this change was ever so gradual and ever so quiet, but it was also quite obvious and many of you have probably heard one of us speak or write about it from time to time.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there's no way to tell which, this subtle, gradual change was happening right in the middle of the combination whirlwind/earthquake/typhoon that we usually just call life, and so we didn't really get much of a chance to pay it a whole lot of attention. In other words, this stuff started to come up for us right about the time we found out we were going to get interviews for the JET program... The conversation maybe went something like this: (last January) "Hey, Erin." "Yeah Isaac?" "I've been thinking about the value of community and deep pers...WHOAH HOLY CRAP JAPAN!? WHOAH!?? WHAT THE CRAP WE COULD GO TO FRICKING JAPAN OH MY GOD CAN YOU BELIEVE IT WE'RE GOING TO INTERVIEW TO LIVE IN JAPAN WITH THE JET PROGRAM!! WHOOOOAAAAHHHH!!!!" (eight months later, and in Japan...) "...onal reflection and really considering what is important in my life. I think maybe we should think about buying some land and... Wait a minute..."
So, that's something about how we ended up here and what we're doing (and not doing) in Japan. That's not to say, obviously, that our time in Japan is a waste. How could it be? It's just to say that, as will happen from time to time in life, our priorities didn't quite sync up naturally with our realities. We're making the most of it here, but all of this I think has only made it all the more difficult to adjust to life in Japan, right when we're starting to realize what it is that we want most out of our life in general... It has also, however, made our transition here all the more valuable. It's made us really scrutinize those values and think about what they truly mean and where they are coming from. Our core values are definitely something we take for granted living in the relative comfort of our native society. If you value something and you're in your own society, you go out and get it, or you don't. If you value something and you're in an entirely new and foreign society, you're a little bit stuck both ways... We can't just go help out a friend on a farm here, we can't just dig up a garden, we can't just sign up for crafts classes at the local civic center for a lot of reasons which are difficult to understand until you run straight into them. So we've had to get creative. We have to ask, what do these values mean to us and why do we hold them? Are they too important to wait? If so, how can we express them ASAP? Questions like these can only ever be a good thing. And we're definitely learning more about ourselves and our values than we've ever cared to before...
Long story just a little bit longer, as a result of this questioning, we've begun to find ways to live out our values in our life here in Japan. Erin, like always, is chipping away writing that awesome story that will someday be a an awesome book. She's also really building up "Erin's English Conversation School" and has six students this week, with more on the way. It seems like being self-employed is hella tight. I've befriended a gardening instructor at one of my agricultural high schools who pushes his high-school level English to very max to help me get involved with the fully functioning farm at the school. Tomorrow, he says, I will be onionman! Last week I was flowerman. And, finally, one of Erin's students RUNS A FRICKING FARM with her husband THAT TAKES INTERNS, and they both speak English! She's going to ask this week about how we can get out there as much as possible and help them out to learn from them...
So that's something like what's been going on here recently.
Thanks for listening! We'll keep you posted!
--
http://loveandengrish.blogspot.com/
