Being organised is a terrible thing.
After literally a month of falling around, not knowing which classes to teach when, not knowing what to teach, and not knowing what the level of English is that I’m supposed to teach, I now suddenly have everything in place. I have a set schedule (thank God!), I have teaching guides and I have some experience of what the classes are and are not capable of.
I’ve got my lesson plans sorted, I have plenty of time to do them, I have plenty of opportunity to adapt them, and things are actually going quite smoothly… apart from the really little ones, they still get my goat. And my goat is not that easy to get, so I need to work on that.
But now that I’m Mr. Organised, I find myself once again with too much time on my hands, and time in my hands is a dangerous thing, because you know what I do with idle time? I think. Thinking is good, but not too much of it. There is too much to think about, to much stuff to analyse, too many places to go with what I’m thinking about and too many things to think about about what I’m thinking about. Makes sense? No, it’s not supposed too. Funny, in Malaysia, most of my family-in-law advised me not to think too much.
You can tell how much time I have by the frequency of my posts, and here I am doing it two days in a row. I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for when I will go to Wuhan to sort my medical tests / visa out, and as is the custom here, nobody is saying anything… so I’m prepared to get up right now, toss a clean pair of underwear in a backpack and be off. The adventurous me. The drop-of-a-hat-me, the me that has already completed the required schedule of 16 lessons this week and now it’s only Wednesday morning. Could have been a whopper of a week, because remember I get paid overtime for everything above 16.
So anyway, back to thinking too much. It has been driving me crazy. Vivid dreams when I’m sleeping, vivid thoughts when my mind is idle, even vivid dreams in between those 5 minutes you get when you hit the snooze button. That’s scary. And I’ve stop taking afternoon naps altogether, because those dreams were most vivid. So I’ve decided, enough! I can’t go on thinking all this much about stuff that essentially is beyond my control now. Stuff that no matter what I can do I will not affect.
For not being religious, I sure think religion is a good thing. Religious people pass their worries onto their God and therefore they are free of it. Whether there is a God or not is not relevant, I think it’s the act of being able to detach yourself from your worries that gives you power. As humans, and follow me while I think a bit, we have to find logic. And to just throw your worries into thin air and expect it to disappear is not logic, so we have to pass it someone, for religious people, to their God. For non religious people, I guess, it’s a bit harder. Who do you pass it to? You carry it yourself and hence your burden.
Today, I will worry no more about things that is not mine to influence.
“Don’t worry. Or worry, but know that worrying is about as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum” – Baz Lazarus, Sunscreen.