Day 1: 6/21/18
I have always wanted to travel more than I do. I can sit here and give 1000 reasons why I haven’t, but that gets me nowhere and the whole point of this journal/diary/whatever is to document my breaking out of my comfort zone.
Being a teacher is stressful. There are all the political reasons it stresses me out, but ultimately it is the personal connections with the kids and the families that push me to my limits. I bring it upon myself, of course, but I genuinely do care deeply about them and their will being. I think that pure investment makes the hardships weigh me down more than most.
I had a string of terrible days back in January at school. I can bore you with the details, but suffice it to say I was sincerely questioning my career choices. On a particularly bad day, I came home angry. Now, many teachers come home angry from time to time, but not me… Not often. I come home frustrated, tired, hurt, but rarely angry. In January, I came home angry. Then I came home again the next day… angry.
Every class I taught for two days in a row had pushed me beyond my limits in terms of patience and I needed a break… a change. I remember the conversation I had with my dad back when I was a senior in high school, one which ended with him telling me to always remember what made me want to go into education in the first place. He said it would help me get through the toughest of times in the profession. That memory spawned a desire to revisit old yearbooks and pictures and upon doing so I came across an old writing assignment from 11th grade. It was basically a “bucket list,” although the teacher never called it that. I noticed while reading back on this 20-year-old assignment that nearly half of the things I had written about wanted to experience before I died were directly related to traveling around the world. Twenty years after those desires were originally written down, I found myself in my mid-thirties having completed none of the traveling I had longed for when I was 16.
The sobering realization that I had not achieve any of the travel goals I had set for myself in the twenty years since pen came to paper for the assignment inspired me. I was once told that it is never too late to correct a mistake. For whatever reason, some things are embedded in my memories and I can never fully ignore them. That saying was one of them, and I immediately booked a trip to Costa Rica and went out the following day to start the process of obtaining a passport. Why Costa Rica of all places? Because the Internet told me it was the “happiest place in the world” and I wanted to find happiness at that particular moment.
My profession doesn’t run my life, but it is very important to me. A tradition I started years ago was the right individual thank you notes to each of my students at year’s end. They served as a means for me to share with them a sense of gratitude for them being such a constant presence in my life. I truly am thankful, although it is very difficult for young teenagers to always realize it. This year, I had multiple students do the same for me, and wrote me notes expressing gratitude. In what is often considered a thankless profession, rarely do I feel completely unappreciated. Seriously. Several of the notes my students wrote to me had a common request, one that honestly threw me off guard. They said in various ways, “take care of yourself.”
“Take care of yourself.” “Make sure to look after YOU too.” Sometimes the realization that the brutal honesty of youth can be the most realistic way to self-reflect
So here I sit. I have been in Costa Rica for roughly six hours, and yet I have already accidentally ordered something I didn’t want to eat, had an awkward exchange with a driver who did not speak English as I tried to make my way to the hotel from the airport, and have been bitten by more mosquitoes than I knew existed in the Western hemisphere. And yet I am happy. Completely alone in a foreign country, and I am happy. More out of any comfort zone than I have ever been in, and I am happy. Let that sink in for just a minute… I am happy because I took a step towards a lifelong goal. I took a step away from a sense of normalcy, and embarked on an adventure that will make me a better person.
While the rainforests, jungles, and beaches await me over the next few days, the past hours at the hotel have already made me grow. As I sit poolside watching a beautiful thunderstorm play its course, the realization that I ordered and interacted with the bartender 100% in Spanish weighs heavily on me and gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment that I have never felt before. By breaking out of my comfort zone, I experience a new emotion, one that is as powerful as it is enlightening.
Inspiration comes from strangest sources sometimes. Never did I think I would eventually be so happy to have such a string of bad days.
Pura Vida, Costa Rica. Pura Vida.