Building the house

I am a quiet little person. There is no shell. There is nothing to break. I am growing to love this house I have built for myself, its quiet fortitude and the door, always open. Inside there is music for chandeliers and poetry gilded across my ceilings. Within its walls there is nothing grey about me at all. Inside I am shedding and learning. The door is always open. I have walls but I won't be ashamed of them and tearing them down will not make me a better person. When I am ready, I will venture out with my head held high and keys in my pocket. And always, the door is open.

I've been rereading my journal from when I was 16.

If I were your student then, I would be the quiet girl who got good grades, but never raised her hand or exhibited much of a personality beyond quiet and good. I would be watching you bond with the extroverted, outgoing students, because it's easier and I find myself doing that too as a teacher.

I am really inspired by this freshness that I seemed to have eleven years ago, an earnest fumbling towards understanding myself and other people that I wouldn't share or claim to possess these days. I forget what it's like to be a teenager, even though I teach them now.

Dani told me that teaching in Korea would be an introvert's paradise, because there is so much space for solitary pursuits. Or luxurious lack of pursuits. I love my quiet, simple apartment and the long daily bus rides through sprawling fields. I can't hear any voices but my own to filter my thoughts. It is gentle living here. It is so easy to be warm, joyful, and still. If living in New York was like being pressed to the jugular of human ambition, here I dwell in its outstretched fingertips, sensitized and yielding.

Annie Dillard said,

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

I haven't made a Korea bucket list, but it doesn't suit me and maybe it's for the best. The only goal I have is to fully inhabit each day and to be diligent and kind. And also now, to make a special effort with my quiet students.