Yesterday I wrote a Facebook status that more than 260 women Liked but this status wasn’t the truth. In fact, it was even pretty far from the truth. I wrote it because the phrase “women do nothing” popped up to my mind as a dissonance to the vibe I am getting from my Feed recently. It simply amused me a lot. After all, women don’t do nothing, ever. We always do something, usually more than one something at a time, obviously.
But now I feel like a liar. So let’s expose the truth. We are in Thailand for almost a month (four weeks tomorrow actually). Most of the time we are in Koh Tao, a small magical island (as they say). We came here so The One can do his “Dive Master”. We thought it would make sense to begin our journey here. Thailand is a relatively easy to digest destination in East Asia. While he will be doing his course we will be on a magical vacation (one more time I say that word and I’ll be asking you to bring me a bucket) and everything will be perfect.
Well… In reality it’s not exactly like that. It took me a week to accept it, another week to process it and now that we’ve seen the end of the Dive Master, I can finally talk about it, and hear me fellas – ambivalence is right here.
Because half the time I feel like I’m not doing anything and the other half (the bigger half!) I think to myself, Good God I am working like crazy here !!!
In reality, most of the time I am alone with the children while The One does his business. And that’s after I already spent with them two months of July and August school vacation, while working almost as usual. Then I was with them during all the Jewish holidays, at home, while The One was occupied with work issues and us pressing together on matters of packing our lives into boxes, papers, emails and countless things to do. I got to the flight with the last breaths of my oxygen tank, to use a metaphor appropriate to Koh Tao, then I found here that I needed one more big deep breath.
In reality, not just I alone with the children most of the time, but apparently it is not as cheap here as we thought it would be, and therefore we are quite, if not very, if not over – calculated with money.
In addition, the house we rented is located uphill and every coming and going involve some pretty steep climbs. I am airlessly exhausted three times a day on average.
In addition, it appears that in Koh Tao, the monsoon season doesn’t really end in August and November a pretty rainy month. So it turns that in part of the days we can’t go to the pool and get stuck at home, sometimes for the whole day.
There are all sorts of “In addition”s but I will not bore you with those. Oh yeah, I’ll add just one more – children’s school, which is something I totally planned that The One will mess with. Well, guess what? That’s on me as well. And let’s just say I’m not exactly a teacher and patience is not my strong side and it all accumulates to a quite respectable, my dear friends, list of things that I really did not think would be so.
It took me a week to realize and another week to digest and I turned quite frustrated during these two weeks, I admit. I admit that even now, I’m mostly waiting that the period here in Koh Tao will finish. The One is struggling madly enough to finish the Dive Master. Here might be the place to note that it was, well, a bit ambitious to plan to complete this course in a month. We are talking about a list that is heavily loaded with tasks, most of which do not depend on him and he has to assign them in a somewhat surreal kind of puzzle to a time table that constantly changes without a warning. One of those things that only The One can do.
It happened to be that when we just got here and stayed in a hotel and not in a rented apartment, I did a small business move that created an impact that I was not expecting and along with it carried a tsunami of work (and money, thank God) in a scale of the work I usually do in a full quarter or even six months at home. So basically I’ve been working like crazy here almost from the day we set our foot in Thailand. This is a blessing, and I’m really not complaining. On the contrary, it came right on time. Since anyway we’re not traveling at the moment, and I have Wi Fi connection most of the time. I might as well use this month as much as possible to make an income.
And then a thought sneaked to my mind. It was probably for the good side that we didn’t go straight from hundred to zero, from one peak of madness to another peak of Shanti. Yes, there is a desire to examine the issue of this Shanti thing during our journey. To examine whether we are people who can be in Shanti mode is a key question that was placed on the table at the outset, and no doubt we will deal with it a lot.
But for now, it is a kind of soft transition. It is still a “need to” state of mind, a lot of “need to”s I dare say. But from time to time the “can do” starts emerging and that’s intriguing.
I’ll stop here, before a tsunami of optimism floods the rest of us and we don’t know what to do with it.
Could you tell more about “Shanti mode”. What is that and what are you looking to achieve? An important goal for my sabbatical is trying to become more of a glass-half-full-optimistic kind of person (unfortunately not my natural born state). It sounds like you might have a similar goal? I would love to learn more about it. How are you getting on? Any tips? Also – on a totally separate note – what plug-in are you using for these comments? I love how easy it is to comment …
Having a year gives you a plenty of the most precious thing in life – TIME. Time to think about yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, your wishes and goals. I am not the same person today as I was before leaving home. I am much more relaxed and “shanti” but I did a lot of work to get there and I cannot really say I am actually “there” yet. There’s always more work to do but as long as I have the time for it I am on the right way.
The comments are part of WP theme we’re using. It’s called Travelify. We haven’t done anything special to have it. It’s just there…