Have received some blog messages from a handful of you expressing adjustment issues you needed to face back home. I know it isn't easy having to adjust to new teachers, bad grades as well as meeting never-ending demands churned out daily by the hectic system. A few still 'blame' me for abandoning the class midway. I would have not taught any batch if i had my way, believe me but i can't come to school and do nothing either. Teaching JC1 would 'hurt' the least, my superiors advised. It was the same for me too. Did my part by informing my classes a month in advance as well so that there would be adequate preparation for handing-over as well as shoring up any sense of injustice or blank compromises that might issue from this departure.
I don't mean to enlarge a minor problem into a big one but there are bigger changes or losses in life that await negotiation and acceptance as we grow older. Sudden death, breakdown of relationships, friends leaving, shift in locality, new values, rejection of past expectations, adjustments in priorities, even changes in personality and outlook. To merely prescribe 'adapt' or 'just cope' as a response seems inept.
Such is the condition, and it is real. Short of sounding detached, these changes you and i are experiencing now are issues we don't weclome readily. But inner movements need to be made, and there are days yet to be filled, hours to be lived and tasks still, to fulfil. Growing up to me, requires and involves constant vigilance, an attentiveness in how i handle change not only as a fact of life but a way of life. I don't mean we undertake a certain frivolity or instability in mood and spirit in handling change. The challenge lies in exercising a sense of daily awareness of what and how 'change' affects me, what remains unchanging and what i / we would like and are able to change. It is easier said than done. A degree of brutal honesty towards oneself is necessary so that we do not live in glass-world of our own making. It shatters in moments of crisis.
To those who are coping not too well with change, and sometimes wished for better times to come, perhaps we need to draw a line between sentimental longing for an impossible past (which stumps our growth) and a healthy appreciation of what has and had been. Find strength in what is left behind. Fate, if you believe in it, has a habit of crossing paths taken by strangers. Some are bound to meet again. The same wish goes to you, my students. Youth is sometimes the worst obstacle to self-awareness even though many claim this phase of life is a springtime of sorts in the experience of thrill, risk and experimentation. Reach deeper and experiment with the inner resources you have within you. Many dislike making that choice. But as what i've learnt, the choices that take us out of our 'safe space' can sometimes prove to be the most rewarding encounter with what we truly value and live for, in life.
Each of us maintain a 'safe space' within us. I owe this term to Helena who describes it as an inner sanctum where we hold back from life and live out a form of fabricated reality so as to escape our deepest yearnings and needs. It comes in many forms: high religiosity, false piety, loud humour, perfectionistic hard work or even intellectualism. I do not absolve myself from such descriptors too. Who knows if this blog serves as a guise for my own unconscious seeking as well?
Fracturing the structures that maintain and uphold our 'safe space' can sometimes take the work of a lifetime. It discomforts. It itches. It may even draw tears and anguish. Like learning how to pray, from scratch. It plunges you to the core of your being. But it is only by doing so that we discover a sense of authenticity that enables us to encounter ourselves as truthfully as we can, with no guise, masks nor dreamscapes to cloud our sense of self. Yeats describes this as 'moments of glad grace', sometimes equivalent to hiding one's face 'amid a crowd of stars'. I shall include the poem in a future entry.
Are you that one star that shines uniquely among a throng, who shares the same grace as you do? No pride, no arrogance- just a daily awareness of our own given attributes (even to reflect on our own response to change) which if we were made aware, would enable us to walk everywhere, amid streets and thoroughfares, not quite knowing, we shine like the sun (Thomas Merton).
. sweatless. breathing cold freezing & free. 
