There are days that being here feels like being in some kind of suspense/horror movie. The way that time doesn’t feel like it exists. The feelings of isolation from everything back home. The inability to communicate properly with people here. A friend here who’s from the States commented the other day that she doesn’t really miss her friends and family all that much. She had a reasonable explanation for it, but it made me a little sad. Anyway, it’s like Japan is this place where foreigners come to do some sightseeing and living and never escape because they get sucked into all the fun things there are to do here and the beauty, and there’s something weird in the atmosphere that makes you forget about everything back home. It’s a strange feeling sometimes.
Which is not to say I’m forgetting about everything back home. You can be sure of that.
A good friend of mine here quit smoking for his 34th birthday, back in early July. He’d tried several times before, but it just didn’t stick. As we played tennis the other morning, I asked how that was going, and he said it was going really well – no problems, in fact. I asked what was different this time around and his reply, “I was ready to quit. Every other time before, I just wasn’t committed to the idea”.
Committed to the idea of quitting. It’s conscious. I was thinking about this yesterday and it’s painfully obvious, but so applicable to other things: smoking will never quit you. Our bad habits are indifferent to the problems they cause us. We are responsible. It’s easy to think that it’s out of our control, to blame it on other things, to blame the problems on the habits themselves, when it’s our own commitment to those habits that create the problems in the first place.
There are things I often hope will change. I want to be more upfront with people, less passive. I want to stop putting up with things that bring me down, and stop putting myself in situations that make me uncomfortable. I often hope that I will wake up one morning and that will be the morning. The morning that I’m committed to the idea. The morning that I make a conscious decision and stick to it. As if I want to wake up and the conscious decision will have been made un-consciously for me in my sleep.
I’m beginning to better understand that it doesn’t work like that.
