Today I realized I had forgotten a few things that I am glad to have forgotten.
Sometimes forgetting is a good sign.
That’s all. This realization brought a smile to my face and even made The Boot feel a bit lighter.
I’m hoping the forgetting was because I have too many other, more important things, to think about and not because I drank a wee bit more red wine than usual on the weekend.
Well, you know how it is. 🙂
Last night I was out with friends for dinner when we decided to go have a drink or two at Marina Bay Sands. More specifically, we decided to go to Ku De Ta, as one of those friends was visiting from out of country.
Having been to Ku De Ta many times before, I had a feeling of what to expect. Their service hasn’t been great. They’ve indicated to me before that they won’t accept my credit card, because it’s associated with a bank account (I tell no lies!) and they won’t accept $500 in cash as a deposit toward a bar tab. I haven’t been impressed. However it’s hard to replicate the experience at Ku De Ta, and so we still went.
This time, however, I was going as an injured person. Boy, was I in for a surprise. First, they would not let me enter without signing an indemnity form. The indemnity form basically meant that I was releasing them of any liability due to my injury/pregnancy. Yes, pregnancy. No – I am not pregnant. But apparently if I were, it’s equivalent to a disability.
They made a bit of a fuss about us wanting to sit down. It’s obvious that I have a broken leg. However, they insisted that if we wanted to sit we would have to pay $3000 and would need a reservation. Even when I insisted that we were not staying long and that I did not want the table –really just a place to sit, because of my leg– they told us we could sit at a reserved table, but only until the reserved party arrived. Fine. And then of course was the case of the bill, which needed to be paid upfront. Fine. But that was enough for me. I left after one drink. It was all a bit too complicated and inhospitable.
Today, however, I had a completely different experience. I had signed up for a coffee roasting tour at Papa Palheta’s Chye Seng Huat Hardware coffee bar several weeks ago. I was looking forward to it and didn’t want to miss it, but I’ll admit that when I woke up this morning and thought about it, I wondered what it would be like with The Boot. Last night’s incident was fresh in my mind.
I arrived and the tour began shortly afterwards. I was concerned about moving around the tour space (roasters, etc.) and hoped that maybe I would be able to lean against something. However I knew the tour was only an hour and after all it was the morning — early enough in the day that my leg didn’t ache yet.
Well, I had nothing to worry about! Within five minutes a lovely gentleman was following me around with a stool so that I could sit at each part of the tour. I was not only surprised — and I offered to carry it myself — but also extremely grateful. This graciousness in the form of service continued throughout the tour. The staff were extremely accommodating in ways unexpected and appreciated. Within a very short amount of time, they had completely won me over.
I realize that Marina Bay Sands has a particular clientele, and that clientele is not really a local one. They are much more interested in wowing flashy tourists than they are developing consistent relationships with people who live in this city.
But I can tell you by way of the brief experience I had, that if I had a more permanent disability, I certainly would be making much more noise about the crap service situation at Marina Bay Sands. Their apparent disregard for anyone who is “outside the norm” is reprehensible. They deserve much more criticism than this blog post allows, and I should really follow up on that. When I finally do get around to writing my scathing letter to the MBS management, I’ll make sure I’m sitting at Chye Seng Huat Hardware while I type it out, sipping a home brew single origin.
I didn’t post yesterday. No really big reason, I guess. I spent most of the day at home managing “life stuff” — paying bills and sorting out the logistics of a big trip this summer, not to mention navigating the issues that surround changing jobs within Singapore as a foreigner.
Not long ago I was living in NYC as a 30something graduate student. After a fairly successful career as a teacher in international schools, it was a big blow to my professional and adult ego to have to rely on borrowed money to survive again. The last time I had done that was when I was in university the first time, more than 15 years earlier. Yeah.
I loved living in NYC but I found it really hard living there while not earning money. Even after I did earn a bit of money working as a consultant for a brief time, I learned it was still hard. NYC is a hard city to live in comfortably unless you’re earning more than $250K annually — and even that’s a struggle if you want to own property. (Don’t get me wrong: it is possible to live in NYC cheaply. It is very possible, and I did it. But it’s not sustainable if you want to do things like travel, have a family, own property or other investments, or you happen to get sick.) I’ll be the first to admit that one of the reasons I wanted to return to an expat life was because I missed my lifestyle. Having a mortgage, living in the suburbs, and commuting 60+ minutes every day to work just isn’t my idea of happiness, particularly when it comes with the sacrifice of regular travel. If my passport doesn’t get pulled out every 90 days or so, I start to get antsy. Plus, I missed having a kitchen with two sinks and some counter space.
Getting back into the working world was great. It felt good to be independent again and I realized how much I missed doing something daily that I felt added value to the world. I have huge amounts of respect for my scholar friends, whose careers involve research, but as much as I enjoy and value research, I don’t love it to the point where I want to do it every day. It’s far too insular and not social enough for me to do daily, and I tremendously missed contributing to part of something big and forward-moving, where I could see the impact of my efforts unfold over a relatively short period of time.
And the money was better.
I’ve never really been one to be motivated by money — is any teacher? — but living close to the poverty line helped me re-frame this a bit (I was living on less than $20K annually in NYC). Here is a truth for me: worrying about finances makes me considerably stressed. CONSIDERABLY. I imagine it does for you, too.
I’m grateful that I’m fortunate enough that I no longer have to worry about this, for the most part, but it has crossed my mind again this week. I’ve lost several nights’ sleep as I contemplate a summer between contracts with no salary, rent to pay, and sudden possible tax clearance (read: $10K gone at once). It’s a very real and arresting concern, particularly as during this time I will be traveling on non-refundable air tickets in a country 30 hours away from my current home. I’m not trying to solicit sympathy here — I know I’m okay, I’m fortunate, I don’t have children (other than a demanding cat), etc. — but I do know that thinking about all of this has elicited a few bottom lines for me:
Thinking more about this now as I type, I’m realizing that I have a lot to learn. Good thing I’m working on a growth mindset in this domain as well.
That’s all for now. Another post is coming later…. I think.
Life is a practice.
We cultivate good habits for “performances” we don’t know are coming.
Habits: thinking, doing, making things happen. If we don’t cultivate good ones, when the time comes that we need them, we might be S.O.L.
If you practice patience in small ways — at the grocery store, when sending an email, when tying your shoelace — you are preparing yourself for the “big event” when you have to wait for test results from the medical lab, or that big job promotion, or those 6 months when you’re unemployed.
If you practice compassion in small ways — the elderly woman crossing the street, the injured bird in your backyard, the child who missed his morning school bus — you are preparing yourself for the “big event” when your family member has been convicted of a crime, or when the boss you loathe has been diagnosed with cancer, or your sister’s pregnancy ends in miscarriage.
These habits of mind — skills of thinking and perspective — are never perfected. They are approached, they are cultivated, they are developed, they are tended to.
They are practiced. It is the practice that grounds us, that keeps us close to what’s real and what’s right and what’s known. This is why we must practice often and with consistence. It is continual; there is no end. We stay real this way.
Practice.
Transformation is sustained change, and it is achieved through practice.
B.K.S. Iyengar
I’ve been reading this book.
And I’ve been thinking about it A LOT.
I can really identify with having a fixed mindset when it comes to sports. I think I need to change this. I’m about 55% through the book (that reference was for you, Alex) and that’s the main area I’ve identified so far that I need to re-think, but it has certainly got me thinking about other areas where perhaps I have a fixed mindset. I need to seriously re-evaluate these areas.
One of the stories that struck me most in this book is the story of Michael Jordan. Before reading this book, I quite honestly had no idea that he was pretty much a crap basketball player when he first started playing. He was cut from the HS Varsity team! He wasn’t recruited by the college he wanted and he wasn’t drafted by the first two NBA teams that could have taken him. He worked his butt off — doing things like practicing for hours after the last game of the season after they had lost; he was preparing for next season (Dweck 85-86).
I remember once getting into an argument with an administrator — a principal at a previous school — about professional growth. I had started the argument, because I was really miffed that an entire year had gone by and I had not participated in any formal professional development activities. My then-principal told me that there would be times in my career when sometimes I just needed to sit back and slide through, that I didn’t always need to be reaching for something bigger and better. He told me that maybe one day when I had a family I would understand (which I found interesting because he himself didn’t have a family). He said that I really just needed to “sit tight” for the time being and coast for a bit, and that that was okay, that I didn’t always need to be “so ambitious.”
This man clearly did not know me well.
I told him that I couldn’t ever — ever! — imagine plateauing in my career, that I didn’t think that way about being an educator, that I never wanted to coast, and that I was dedicated to always wanting to become better. I told him I would be going to a conference that year whether the school paid for it or not.
(And I did. And the school did end up paying for it, thankfully. But I was fully prepared to go on my own coin that year.)
He still argued with me. I remember him muttering something about how I’d been teaching long enough that I should know that there’s really a limit to what you can know about being a teacher, and that after a while it all is the same, anyway.
He had a fixed mindset.
I, thankfully, did not. And I daresay it’s the reason I’m a better teacher now than I was then, several years ago now.
Dweck tells the story of the one time Michael Jordan decided to coast, the year he returned to basketball after trying out baseball, “… and he learned his lesson. The Bulls were eliminated in the playoffs.”
You can’t leave and think you can come back and dominate this game. I will be physically and mentally prepared from now on.
(Michael Jordan, in Dweck 99)
The question I’m ruminating over now — and it may well be a question I spend my lifetime thinking about — is this: how can I transfer the growth mindset that I have about being an educator to other areas of my life? How can I continually keep growing, developing, and learning as a human being?
I have a lot of work to do.
1
There is a certain grace in getting somewhere slowly. I’ve realized these last 10 days that perhaps one of the reasons I’m so freaking accident prone is because I always seem to be in a hurry. I take things out of cupboards quickly. I walk super fast. I sometimes whip around in my kitchen so quickly that I drop knives on the floor. I really need to just chillax sometimes.
2
Everyone else really seems to be in a hurry, too. Not toooooo many people have stopped to walk slowly with me and chat along the way. A few have, and I have really appreciated their conversation. Others have stopped to help (as I mentioned last time) but they don’t seem to know what to talk about when we’re going so slow, and I keep feeling their impatience, gurgling at the surface of the trite things in our conversation. Is this what others feel like when they’re around me when I am in a hurry? :-/
3
Sitting for too long makes for a sore back. This is problematic because walking or standing for too long (more than 10 minutes, generally) makes my foot ache. So I am trying to find a balance. I really wish I could just pull out my yoga mat at school…
4
Taking taxis everywhere is really quite a luxury (and an expensive one at that — oof! I need to write a separate post about the expenses of illness), but the truth is it makes me a little bit lonely. I actually enjoy taking public transport. I like being around people, as crazy as they are. I enjoy people-watching. I like the energy. I like feeling like I’m part of something, even if that something is just the shared experience of Going To Work. Taxi drivers in Singapore are generally lovely — and quite helpful when you’re injured — but I miss being around people in the mornings and evenings. I miss the collective energy of those parts of the day. I’m feeling more isolated now, and I’m not sure how to deal with that. Stay tuned for future lessons. 🙂
5
I am becoming more patient with myself. I now know it will take me nearly 7 full minutes to walk to the gym or canteen from my desk. Stairs will take 3x as long as usual, regardless of whether up or down — last week’s fire drill wasn’t fun! But I’m okay with this now, and after nearly tripping over a curb (!!) in a parking lot last week while I was chatting with someone and not paying attention, I am realizing that it is far more important for me to just SLOW DOWN and get from Point A to Point B properly. The last thing I need is another broken bone!
I received an email from a family member today that really reminded me of the body-mind-soul connection.
I mean, IÂ know this stuff already, yadda yadda yadda. I know it intellectually. But I think I had forgotten it. Or at least forgotten the power of it.
My health has not been great these last 7-8 months. This current stress fracture has been a pain, as I’ve already mentioned. It’s also been a good teacher. And today’s email from afar reminded me that the stress fracture could also have been caused indirectly by …
… stress.
Lord only knows there has been a LOT of it since about… May 2012.
I have much more to say on this, but it’s late… and I’m tired. I love my life — I have it really good, I know I do — but I’ll be happy when one of the more stressful parts of it has come to an end. Even my bones will be happy.
🙂
What is it about sleep that is so problematic?
Why is it so hard to get enough? Why does modern society frown on the idea of sleeping when you’re tired? Why must we always be awake? Why do we want to always be awake? Or why does our body want to be when our mind doesn’t?
It’s a fact that if we get less than 6 hours of sleep in consecutive nights, we behave cognitively as though we are drunk. This is fact. And yet we go to work. We raise children. We drive cars. We do all kinds of things, when really, we should be sleeping.
These are my thoughts after rough and long day, brought on by a strange bout of insomnia last night. Also strange is that these strange bouts are becoming less strange as I get older. Mind you, I suppose that is commensurate with the research which indicates that the older you get, the more this is a problem. I’m also discovering that at least for me, when I’ve been sleep-deprived for more than a few days, this can be a trigger for a nasty migraine.
I really wish more organizations would take after Google and company, who allow napping at work. Why don’t we allow napping in all workplaces? And schools? (And while we’re on it — why do secondary schools start so freaking early given all we know about adolescent circadian cycles? THIS IS NOT NEW RESEARCH!)
That’s all. I just wanted to share today’s truth (which I suspect will be a regular one): sleep is good and important and we probably all need more of it.
Some days, the Internet brings out the worst in people. Today was one of those days.
The racist, classist, ageist, and Islamophobic remarks I saw today on Twitter were ASTONISHING. And don’t even get me started on the political and geographic ignorance. For parts of today, I hated humanity. I wanted to find a spaceship, take myself, my cat, and a few friends and family members — the ones who have demonstrated true empathy for others — and rocket off to another planet (maybe something like Naboo?) to start civilization anew.
I disconnected a bit instead. Damn Internet, bringing these horrid views into my head and my life!
It has been said before that a true measure of a society is to what extent empathy is embedded into its core.
Today, we would fail that measure. Actually, I wonder if we’d pass, ever.
I had a crazy day today.
Nothing unusual for a teacher, really… many teacher days can seem crazy. If you are not a teacher, and I described my day to you from beginning to end, I imagine you’d have all kinds of questions. You’d think parts of it make no sense, and you’d be right, but I’d tell you that this is just a regular day in the life of a teacher.
Many of my colleagues had similar crazy days today — and this is also not unusual. This is a regular Friday. We were pulled in different directions solving different problems, doing different things. There seemed to be little overlap today.
I got to the end of the “regular” school day today and went off to a conference that another school was hosting. In the taxi on the way there, I conversed with colleagues about The Boot and travel and other bits and pieces — all lovely but condensed conversation. Once we got to the conference, I had to sit on the aisle because of The Boot (my leg had been throbbing all day — not a help to the crazy day). I was beginning to be worried that I would be sitting alone because of The Boot when a colleague came to sit next to me. Confession: I do worry about sitting alone sometimes; not all the time, but sometimes.
I warned Katie when she sat next to me that I was in a cranky mood because of The Boot, and because I had had a crazy day. She smiled and said that was okay and asked me how I was doing generally (“outside of The Boot”) and then she wanted to know the story behind The Boot. Katie is a details person and had lots of questions. I had already told the short version of the story what seemed like hundreds of times, but Katie wanted to know history and specifics and she was such a good listener. I told a very extended version of the story of The Boot that went back to the age of 16, involved travel to Venezuela, moving to England, surgery, and lots of research. Katie listened to all of it. And asked even more questions.
And then the conference started.
The conference was about middle school, and the speaker was talking about how important it was for us to be advocates for children, even when sometimes those children were challenging and desperate for attention. I could identify with a lot of it and spent part of his session feeling bad about the kids I saw that I didn’t talk to enough today. Later when we broke out into smaller groups, I realized that my mood had changed somewhat, and it wasn’t just because the speaker was brilliant. I mean, he was great. But I realized I felt different because of what had happened just prior to his talk.
I realized that until the moment when Katie sat next to me, I had had the kind of crazy day when I hadn’t spoken to a single person in a real, genuine way. My entire day had consisted of snippets and busy-ness and getting things done and logistics of putting out fires or paperwork or helping people find places, etc. I had talked to many different people — including students — but had not had a real, active conversation with any of them.
Until Katie at 3:50pm.
All I really needed to get out of my cranky zone was a real conversation. It was sooooo normal and so nice and so easy, and so caring. And after that, the day was better.
Thanks, Katie, for just asking questions and listening. Thanks for a normal, caring conversation to bring me back to life.
