Skip to main content

Mountains

Life feels like a mountain with no designated path to take. Both beauty and horror are in this feeling.

It is horrible because you will get lost and you will be scared. A lonely and quiet experience for all of us.

It is also beautiful.

It is beautiful because you can change your path, if intuition insists. This change displays the mountain from a different view. A different perspective.

A path change often reveals where you are truly trying to go. It clears your vision, so you see the mountain as a whole. Life as a whole. So you can accurately map your climb.

This is where I'm at right now. I am approaching a year in Japan and I've dramatically changed the path of my life.

I went from Philadelphia to Kakamigahara to Chiba, where I am currently working from. Chiba is buzzing with energy and I can sense myself being fueled by it. It will be the place where I imagine my 25th year.

I went from being an Uber driver to being an EFL educator. Being an educator has brought me closer to my true self.

My days are exhausting and I cannot be more thankful for this. For this is what life is about. To trek up the mountain, step by step, day by day, in pursuit of a plateau of happiness. 

J.S




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Take Your Time

  I arrived at the bottom of Mt. Fuji at 7am. Before starting, a man said that I had 12 hours to complete the trail, in order to catch the final bus home for the night. Otherwise, I would have to sleep on the mountain. I thought 12 hours was a sufficient amount of time, but it caused me to rush at first. After a half-hour, I was exhausted and contemplated quitting. The ground felt like sinking rocks the size of tennis balls. The trail was steep.  What should I do? I asked myself. Go back down? Rest? Go only half-way up? Then it occurred to me, go slowly. A motto for life, perhaps. Life may feel fast, but if one takes their time, slowly and steadily, they can enjoy it more. Moving forward, the next 4 hours consisted of a slow ascent up the mountain. I was literally stepping about 6 inches at a time. This allowed me to keep my breath, something I lost at the beginning. Eventually, I found myself at the 8th station, the final stop before the summit.  It was 1pm. 6 hours befo...
1 comment
Read more

The Uber Summer

295 trips. A small sample of the people who make up Philadelphia and it’s suburbs, but 295 trips can really teach an Uber driver about the beauty of stranger interaction. Before I talk about the lessons learned driving for Uber, I must admit that the job itself wasn’t even slightly pretty. Dents and potholes and wrong turns and near-empty gas tanks all hindered my joy rides through the city. The amount of fast food I consumed in the last three months was out of desperation, not choice. Let’s just say Burger King’s 10-piece $1.49 nugget combo was part of a calming, therapeutic ritual, otherwise known as a dinner break. The road rage was real, the pay was shitty, and the tickets subtracted too much my earnings. Okay the tickets were mostly my fault, resulting from parking at an unfed meter for 20 minutes or zooming through an E-Z pass lane. I also feel like people driving on congested roads are only capable of two emotions; neutral and angry. This was unsettling to deal with. Traffic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Small World

Moving to Japan hits you in stages. I think I'm past the initial "culture shock" stage and have moved into the “gratitude” stage. I'm fully aware that I've moved across the world and stick out like a sore thumb, but at the same time I know that this place has everything I could possibly need. I’m aiming for consistent daily growth. Japan is the ideal country to spend my 24th year. It sort of feels like a bubble, though. The people here are disciplined and seem to have this killer instinct to protect the countries pureness. Almost like they know that the rest of the world is toxic. What has been the most unbelievable to witness are the universal similarities between the people of our world. We all eat, sleep, and have our inner thoughts. It's terrifyingly beautiful how similar we are. Children are explorers. All kids bask in their wandering minds. Everyone has emotional struggle and success, it’s just a matter of which wave you’re currently riding. The...
4 comments
Read more