However, I met several farang over the weekend (Australians, British, etc) and one of them said something to me that struck a chord. He mentioned one time when he was extremely sick with what sounded like a bout of bad food poisoning. He had been lying on the bathroom floor all night and hadn't slept a wink, and started sobbing about how much he missed home and how badly he wanted to leave. Almost as soon as that thought crossed his mind, he realized he wasn't really homesick. He was extremely ill and in that moment of weakness, his brain caught an opportunity to latch on to this weakness. I think this is what happened to me last Wednesday-I felt absolutely miserable, I was exhausted, and an object from home that I purchased with my mom was totally wrecked. My brain reacted to all of these factors at once, and the final result was a near hysterical sobbing attack. However, I don't really want to go home right now and I am actually really starting to love it here.
I also started reading a book called "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg. Basically, it tells the tale of several individuals and large corporations who, rather than overhauling entire systems or routines, simply took on one task which in itself did the overhauling. In the most primitive part of our brain, the basal ganglia, we store our memories of basic tasks like walking and breathing. Other memories and routines are stored in the outer layers of our brain (like an onion, or a parfait...Shrek anyone?). For example, every morning I wake up, take a shower, get dressed, eat, brush my teeth, do my make-up and put my right shoe on first. But what would happen if I simply started putting my left shoe on first? Or if I ate first then showered? Believe it or not, it could change the course of your day, week, month, and perhaps life. I came to Thailand in large part because I needed to break a habit, to switch up my routine, and I am not going to let being homesick or sick-sick take that belief away from me.
You may be wondering now about the title of this post, "Rivers Know This." Well, it's taken from a quote by A.A. Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh) which in it's entirety goes "River know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday." Too often we wish that the day would just end or that this year would just hurry up and be over. However, we will never get that crappy day or that slow-moving year back, just as we can never catch up on lost sleep. Whether an experience is good, bad, funny, sad, traumatic, or what-have-you, it is an experience and that is what has become so underrated. You've all heard this before, that our experiences shape us and make us who we are today. I'm not going to beat a dead horse, but it is true. Yeah, I felt HORRIBLE last week. There was a moment or two in my feverish, hacking-ridden state that I wanted to hop the next plane to Bangkok and then home. Now that I am better, I appreciate being sick because it taught me several more things about myself:
1. It's pretty cool that I am a female who moved to a foreign country 10,000 miles from home by herself.
2. A year is going to absolutely fly by, and I cannot waste a single minute of it.
3. I never want to be sick with the plague in a subtropical country ever again, EVER in my life.
4. I CAN do this, and I WILL do this.
5. Life is journey, not a destination. The more we will our time to quicken, the more we waste our precious time here on Earth.
So thank you to my kindergartners or to the small bacterium I probably caught in Laos. Without you and your germs, I probably would have never fully learned these lessons. This past weekend was incredibly fun and relaxing because I opened up to the idea of actually liking it here and having that be okay. I met lots of new Thai and farang (foreign) friends, and I am happy. I haven't had many adventures this past week or so, so no new pictures to post. But I hope those of you back home can take the message out of this and somehow relate it to your own life.
Next time you are standing on a bridge over a river, think about how far that water has travelled and how far it will go. Whether the water is moving rapidly or meandering along, a river is still in no hurry to get to it's final destination because it really has none. It may end up in a lake or the ocean, it may evaporate, maybe it will dry up. What will happen in the future is something the river could never know without first embarking on its journey through hills and mountains, forests and fields, cities and villages, and so on. In this way, we too need to realize that our greatest potential lies not in our final destination, but in the experiences, lessons, people, and places that we find and lose along the way. We are being steadily pushed through life without a remote control, so think about the future, but don't plan it too strictly; learn from the past, but don't let it haunt you. Simply go with the flow and your life will unfold as it is meant to be. And check out "Power of Habit," because it's really good and it might change your life a bit too.
Also, try putting your foot in a different shoe this morning. Who knows what could come of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment