At work, at home, on vacation, even in your local circles of friends and in the community. You never know what to expect. And if you expect anything, be prepared to have it be totally off base.
Sudden cancellations of a lesson. Sudden surprise lessons. Lessons that went well in the morning but badly in the afternoon. Suddenly being asked to teach a class by yourself because a teacher is absent. Suddenly being asked to run a club with someone else, just kidding, that person is never there and you're by yourself.
Suddenly having your heater break in the dead of winter. The gym being closed for reasons you can't read. A doctor's appointment that makes you run late enough to miss the supermarkets that close super early, leaving you with no food for the evening. The NHK man stalking you always, like a ninja who comes when you least expect it.
Flights that get delayed. Guided tours that guide you away from all the places you want to be. Flights that say they're going to turn back because of too much snow and then don't. Suddenly finding a heavy metal band you like at the Snow Festival in Sapporo, of all places.
Suddenly being pulled into a side room of a random building only to find they're recruiting people for a musical (I gave them fake contact info and never saw them again). Religious missionaries from across the street constantly bringing you cookies and sweets and asking you to convert. And then there's the ALT communities on JET, which can be a lot like high school. People form cliques and there's drama sometimes. This isn't all bad, but it's a very bizarre return experience to that. I can assume that you can assume that that's pretty unpredictable, as well.
"Be ready for anything" should be a mantra of the program.
Even now, these past four months have probably been the most unpredictable of all. I had plans for the future that fell through. I don't know where I'm going when my contract is up. I don't know what I'm going to do with the six months I have left, and if I've learned anything, it would be to accept that and to stop expecting anything.
I think this is good life experience in general. We play out events in our head, we think we understand the world or other people. But then it can be turned on its head in an instant. A situation you thought would go one way ends up going in a totally different direction. A vacation you wanted to take ends up not happening, and you go somewhere else instead. A person you thought you knew reveals themselves to be someone with a side to them that you could have never seen from the surface.
I preach a lot in my life about a grand plan, fate, God's will, and what have you. I preach a lot about everything happening for a reason. The only reason I can do this with such certainty and such drive is because NOTHING that has happened to me over this past year and a half has made any sense to me, and all of it, both good and bad, has come from nowhere, from the side or from the back, ambushing me, surprising me, and sometimes leaving me flat on my face.
On this program, you often hear people ask each other why they applied for it. People have different reasons. They love Japanese culture, they want to travel, they want to take a break from their regular lives for a while, or they want to go on a journey of self discovery. It's often a mix of things. Mine was mostly that last one, a journey about finding myself.
I was trying to make one post without showing the nerd inside of me, but I guess I can't resist. I think back to Lord of the Rings, where Frodo and his friends left their comfortable Shire to see the real world outside, to go to very uncomfortable, and often frightening places, in order to see a good deed done in the end. Coincidentally, that entire film trilogy is now on Japanese Netflix, while only the first movie in on the American Netflix. I could only finish the journey by leaving home and going to Japan!
I still question a lot of the things happening to me, even right now as I type this post. But I have faith that my own sense of direction is worthless, and that the universe knows better and is putting me in the right place. A place I couldn't get to by myself.
You don't need to go to Japan to get to that place, but you do need to step outside of your comfort zone and embrace the unknown.
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