Busan the balancing city of the south

What an appropriate weekend vacation, That felt like a month-long retreat in my physical, emotional, spiritual being! I travelled with some friends to the south coast of Korea for a surfing adventure in Busan. And in three short days I feel like I have rejuvenated my mind, body and spirit with months of meditation, relaxation and stress/worry free living.

I am definitly taking pages out of this weekend's diary to help me reorganize the next two months of potential anxiety. The choice between staying and going has been on my mind for months. Since I arrived in Korea, I have battled with myself over whether to stay here or not. I have embrassed so much here and been shy of many other things because of the fear of estabilishing attachments I intend to break. And in the past two months I have had dreams and nightmares almost nightly over the decision to stay where I am, to explore here more, or to move on to Japan. About two weeks ago I made my decision, and it seems since then all parties on all sides of that decision have been trying to convince me otherwise.

It is a hard decision to make, and even more difficult to explain. It doesn't mean staying or going, but my decision is to act in ways to fulfil my desires. And it is hard when I am constantly butted with the wishes and desires of others. I like to make people happy. I like to help others fulfil their dreams. It is one of the greatest joys of my existance. I like to help others succeed, and if I believe my presence can do that, it is hard for me to withdraw.

Anyway, this weekend let me finally feel free to make my own decision. I was finally free to enjoy my life today and not worry and agonize over tomorrow. What I can do tomorrow to help those around me feel the joy of this life will be sorted when tomorrow becomes today.

It's not that it was breath-takingly beautiful, or that I had an epiphany, or that it was mind-blowingly awesome, it wasn't an adventure to end all advenutres where friendships and loves were forged stronger than ever before. It was just a weekend, in another country, in a different place. Surrounded by the familiar and unfamiliar. Water and air, cars and people, music and earth, couples shirts and bikinis, skinny dipping and hypothermia. Just a weekend away.

And I think the turning point was this hanja (kanji...). Which has appeared several times in the past few weeks. But, I saw it again this weekend and it just made sense. It just looked balanced. It, I guess, has many meanings but literally can be the middle. Our centre, our in between, the division in half, half way...this sort of stuff. 중 or naka in Korean and Japanese...But it also looks like a dragonfly. An important symbol of balance, guidance and fear of the unknown. It just looks right. and it's a great meditation point for me. i think.

So there it is. Balanced. Centred. So stop asking about what I am going to do. I am living. And it feels good.

Stop making school easier, please.

Is this the danger of naming things? The more names we have for things the more effort we have to put into learning things names, rather than learning things. But at the same time, it can be fairly easy to learn a list of names, and it's dangerous because to often we stop at learning the name and don't go on to learn the thing as well.

We came up with a name for the faculty of inquiring, asking questions, genuinely wondering...we called it critical thinking. We reified the faculty, made it into a thing we can post on blogs and in mission statements and then forgot to figure out what it means and even worse forgot that this faculty is most exciting and intriguing in our educations in the world.

We want to categorize and label, list and stabilize knowledge, but forgot that the concrete concept-word refers to an unstable thing: to an idea, a flow of energy or sound, or communication. Education is dumbing down into these stabilized things, becoming a learning about what it is to have an education, and less about inquiring into the world. Not that Emile had an ideal education, of course such an education can hardly be mass produced or made available to everyone (or can it? Don't knock it till you have tried it...); but there must be balance, and time and space to inquire. Not to learn the concept-word inquire: how to spell it, what it means when calling the phone company. But, to actually just ask, wonder, be amazed.

But, still the move (caused largely by unqualified teachers like me teaching in standardized settings--rather than organic setting where our lack of qualification/knowledge about how to teach, is made up for by our natural knowledges and abilities to inquire) to replace education with test prep is the greatest tragedy of our generation. More and more courses dictated, replicable, equal opportunity, the same experience repeated and repeated. Stamped, standardized we can now compare what we know this year to what student knew last year, and if the program is really old to what students knew the year before.

But standardized, curved and fitted so we never have a real measure of growing knowledge. Children are our greatest sources of novelty and yet we are putting them through 15 years of replication to stamp out all that novelty.

Education should be a vehicle, not number. It should be a blank sheet, not a letter of congratulations. Education should be life long, not hold your breath and wait to finish puberty...This is one under qualified and over-frustrated teacher.