Blogging about my blog, learning about life

A nice reminder of what an awesome ESL teacher I was

It's the calm before the storm, I feel. Starting March 31st I will be insanely busy for a 10 week stint. Between teaching a course at UO, supervising student teachers, working part time as an assistant researcher, and teaching yoga who knows when I will have time to even think about how much time I don't have. Aye!

But for now, I'm feeling a brief calm and instead of using my time wisely to prepare for my class, I'm finding myself re-reading old blog entires which in it's own way is very useful for reflection and self-growth. That's the cool thing about having been blogging (relatively) consistently since January 2010.  That's 5 years! A lot has happened in the past five years and it's kinda neat to relive it all through my blog. Some things I read are embarrassing, some hilarious, and some even heart-breaking. 

 I think the greatest lesson to be learned from reading old blog posts is, ironically, contentment (santosha). This idea of contentment is something that I have wrestled with for a long time, hence me naming my blog Santosha. I don't suppose this to be the end of my wrestling, but maybe now I've just been ushered into a new class of wrestling. I've got some insight based on my experiences and how I can now reflect upon what I wrote.

Most importantly, I am amazed at the shift in my happiness or contentment during my time as an ESL Teacher. I started out bright-eyed and bushy tailed, excited about my job and life and somewhere down the line I became disillusioned. I let a desire for more (more money, more education, more degrees, more life experiences, more places to say that I lived in) cloud my vision of just how truly good my situation was. If I remove those desires from the equation, all of which are materialistic or ego-driven (aside from the desire for more life experiences, of course) I can reach the conclusion that I always had everything that I ever needed. Unfortunately, it took giving up those things to realize how truly perfect they were. So, in this sense, I believe it to be impossible for a human to understand contentment unless they have once abused their own understanding of it.  Or like Joni Mitchell said "You don't know what you got till it's gone".  

But, hey, at least now I'm cured of my grass is always greener syndrome.