Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Reflection 6/30-7/23/2013

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.
Henry Ford

So here goes nothing. I’ve never written a blog, I’ve never wanted to and honestly, still don’t. I’ve heard many people say that if they could do it all over again, they would blog about their experiences, so alas, here I am. Leaving so abruptly was never the plan, but now that I think of it, nothing ever seems to go to plan. This can be a good and a bad thing. First, we’ll explore the latter..

The term “bad” I guess is relative (much like everything else), but in this case it means that I planned to join the Peace Corps and carry about the next 2.5 years of my life in a place I dreamed about for a good portion of my life. Then the plan was to find an entry level UN job, a secret long term goal of mine, however this didn’t happen. Instead, I ended up resigning from a very large and successful organization to pursue teaching. TEACHING?!? You may say.. Yeah I almost couldn’t believe it myself, but with a Teaching English as a Foreign Language certificate gathering dust in my closet, I figured it was worth a shot. I mean, what were the chances that out of how many different applications I would be chosen to go to a Country half way around the world, right? A Few short weeks later, and I plopped in Taiwan.  I left something that I was good at, but not passionate about, for the unknown. I left my amazing friends, family and comfortable lifestyle for something that I was banking on helping me discover my true calling and passion. So, despite it being hard to leave people that I cared so much about, it was even more difficult to look at my situation and hate where I was in life. I took a job right out of school in hopes of paying off a good portion of my loans, and traded in my happiness and drive in the process. So back to what I said before about luck. This is precisely where my luck changed, or at least that’s how I like to look at it.

I’ve always thought that it’s important to learn from the point of view of others. Although on a small scale, I struggle with it (like most people unless you’re God) from pointless tiff’s to full fledge arguments. I do, however, believe on a much larger scale the importance of embracing change. Change surrounds us and can either choke us or help us grow. I chose to grow with change. Some still may be confused with my not so straight career path, but it all make sense to me. Changes and how we react to changes, define who we are and who we want to become. I probably will not become an English teacher in the states, granted I can’t say for certain because I just started, however I know what my main goal is. I think of this as a unique opportunity to empower young children through language, while empowering myself through an atypical experience that will (hopefully) allow me to attain a career in which I want to wake up and go to.

Some people are driven by money, others by love, I’m driven by passion. I think that money, love and any other byproduct of whatever one thinks happiness is, comes from passion. Hence, maybe when things don’t go to plan, it’s because there’s something better out there for you. To quote the classics, “there may be something there that wasn’t there before.”

So, here it is; the first entry of my very first blog. From now on, it will mainly do with learning opportunities, new things I have discovered about the culture/people, as well as new things that I have discovered about myself.

Cheers!

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