August 20, 2021 Update

 

I finally signed a contract to work for another year. The next day, I received an email saying that the first month of classes would be online.  In the small university town that I work in, I estimate conservatively that another one-hundred small businesses will permanently close. If I apply the same estimate to all of Taiwan, we’re looking at an additional 12,000 small businesses that are likely to permanently close their doors this year. While small independently owned businesses are increasingly being forced to go out of business, large businesses are thriving. This situation is rapidly going to become unsustainable.

 While they’re saying that we’re just going to have the first month of classes online, I’m guessing that we’ll be having classes online for the next 3-4 years — if we're able to have classes at all. About ten million or 41% of the people on this island have already received their first dose of a so-called vaccine. Aside from government representatives (who look like talking zombies, if you ask me), the scientists, doctors and specialists that I listen to all say essentially the same thing, it’s not a vaccine, but a bioweapon.

 After two months of unsuccessful attempts to persuade my partner not to get injected, I recognize that she is probably going to do so sometime next week, and that she has made her own decision, perhaps at a very deep level. The only compromise I could get out of her (for better or worse) was for her to switch from a foreign made vaccine to a Taiwan made one. Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, is also apparently scheduled to receive her first injection of the same vaccine, next week. The good thing is, as I’ll be working from home, I’ll be able to care for my partner in case the so-called vaccines turns out to be a problem. Perhaps I’ll even get to see if those spike proteins have any effect on me. Fascinating times.

 My summer vacation has not gone as well as I had planned, I didn’t get to go swimming for the first two months, and I wasn’t able to convince my partner to just say no to the vaccine. Nevertheless, I apparently still have a job, and I’m told that the swimming pool may open this week. Thus, as I’m now planning to teach online, at home for the foreseeable future, perhaps I’ll be able to go swimming every day. That would be cool.

 While there is much more that I could say (for the umpteenth time) about where we are and where we’re heading, I feel that the time for talking is pretty much over. It appears to me that a time of reckoning will soon be upon us, and I’m quite sure I’ll have something to say about that.

Overwhelmed

It feels like I’m filled from the bottom of my stomach up through my eyes with an airy substance, like grey smoke or pollution that’s been energized. It hurts, it’s tiring and I want to go back to sleep, but I know that I wouldn’t sleep and that it wouldn’t solve the problem.

I feel an urge to lash out at anyone around me in blame, but I know that they have nothing to do with what’s happening inside of me. It’s so weird because as these projections come up within me, just a picture here and there and I am able to read the entire story of the planned mind playout to project blame onto my external reality. Instead of following the mind’s path though, I just say no and push myself to do the absolute last thing that I want to do - write it out of me.

As soon as I begin writing, the pain begins to diminish. This is the key to dealing with emotional issues - stopping the projections, bringing everything back to myself and doing the opposite of what I feel like doing - writing it out of me.

Every year around this time, I’m required to give grades to hundreds of students, counting over thousands of assignments, blog posts, assessing projects, class participation, calculating it all together and then entering it into the university system. However, like so much of what I do and say these days, much of it is just guesswork. Interestingly, whereas I used to pretend that I knew what I was doing, nowadays I do a lot less pretending, but what I do is for the most part, still just guesswork. I bet I could write a thousand books on all of the guesses I’ve made, yet only a few that I am truly certain of.

The other day in a meeting, someone asked me how I could possibly make a decision without first doing that and that - which of course I hadn’t done for a number of reasons. I could have provided a technical sounding explanation sufficient enough to baffle those around me, but I didn’t. Instead, I simply said to give me a week and I would get back to you. Some persisted in wanting to know, so I mentioned my workload, the room went quiet and I even received an apology. The funny thing is, though I do manage a lot of stuff, it’s only a tiny fraction of what I’m able to manage. Yet still I feel somewhat overwhelmed - but that, too, as I’ve been writing has begun to diminish. 

Oh and I am actually moving out of this experience step by step. Beginning to write this blog post was step one. While I was writing it, I was also working on other things (work related) and I even went swimming a couple hours ago. Thus, the fog has begun to clear. 

When such experiences arise, we have the choice to drag them out and be dragged down by them or to step in and move directly through them.