Silent Companion

My sleep is disturbed in the early morning hours, every morning, to the premature cawing of roosters. The night is still penetrated by deep darkness and I know I have many more hours to sleep. I wait with closed eyes under my mosquito net for the roosters to stop their calls and then, frustratingly, for the dogs to stop howling their responses to the roosters and to again find peace within the night. I know that in any number of hours this routine of noise will commence again but that the next time I will have to get up and begin my own routine. I sigh deeply because my heart is tinged with a desire to not have to get up, to not have to go through another Thai day. Sometimes I just want the day to be over, for it to already be the next, and for time to just move so quickly that before I know it, I'm ready to say goodbye to Thailand and move on with the next part of my life. Yesterday morning, however, started off differently. I woke in the early hours of the morning, as any morning, to the sounds of the roosters but this time a small, sinister smile formed on my lips as I rememberd that I didn't have to go into school that day. I slept in, took my time that morning getting ready, and ended up at a restaurant eating some of the worst fried rice I have had in Thailand thus far (the chicken that I asked to be put in the dish was more bone and fat than it was meat). Through the pure simplicity of freedom that day I found inspiration to inspect my life and through those thoughts, I have renewed and refreshed my life in Thailand....this, in an attempt to summarize, is what I discovered:

Time is a beast. One of those close-your-eyes-don't-look kind of beasts that imminently lurks within your shadow fueling you with the desire to beat it back with a superfluously thorny, oversized stick. Throughout my my meek 23 years of life (meek in the sense that 23 years just doesn't exactly tip the scales in the whole plot of of existence itself) the beast has ineludibly dragged me by my arm and no matter how often or how hard I fight back, it's gruesome entity just won't let go. As I was sitting in the restaurant yesterday I realized, with flaberghasted shock, that I have already been in Thailand for almost half a year! Oh how the beast and I are inexorably intertwined!! Along with this realization, however, came another: I have, through my loneliness and thoughts of home, ashamedly forgotten this transparent and obvious fact. I currently want the beast to move me along quickly while at the same time entirely disregarding the fact that the beast ALREADY IS moving...and at exponential speeds at that! This zinger came at me pretty hard. I sat back and realized that if I keep wanting the beast to move more quickly I will end up, two years from now, entirely regretting the fact that I didn't take my time; that I spent my time instead wishing it to move faster. Enjoy the time for what it is in the here and now right? We've all heard this many times before but it came at me differently yesterday. I told myself that I need to chill out and enjoy what Thailand innately has for me. I asked myself what that was and my response: My life. I don't know all of what Thailand has for me but the plain and simple fact is: this is my life! How could I continue to live with myself knowing that I have actually been stroking the beast, tempting it to pull me along faster while my whole life before this point I had been battling the beast back with a stick? I still see time as a beast - it just inevitably is. But now instead of the beast lurking it is more so the silent companion that sits with me on Song Tao rides (public transportation of sorts). The beast isn't exactly my best friend but I have an appreciation for its company because I know that without it, I wouldn't be living my life.

So there you go. That isn't exactly detailed about my day to day activities, in fact, I still don't think you really know what I do. Maybe I'll explain that in the next blog. For some reason I have been unable to transfer any pictures so I will have to put on pictures that friends sent me. Hope it suffices for now. The first picture is of our 119 group during the Swearing In / 45th Anniversary Celebration. The Princess is in the middle. The second picture is of the school that Bekah and I worked at in Sakeo during training. Ok, love to all :)