one foot in front of the other

When I flew home for my brother’s wedding in September I took the opportunity to replace some of my things. I brought a bunch of clothes from Busan that I never wore and in return I grabbed a huge stack of flute music, some pans and tea balls from my kitchen, some books, a pillow, and a few other miscellaneous items.

I also chose to bring some posters to put up in my new home, even though I knew I would only be here for a few more months. One is a replica of Van Gogh’s starry night – a beautiful blue poster featuring bold brush strokes and an unidentified couple near the river with a city landscape and starry sky on the horizon. It’s a poster I bought at a tumultuous personal time and it has always had a soothing effect on me. Continuing with this blue theme I brought back a piece of spray paint art that I bought on my first trip to New York. It is old and battered and may soon be thrown away, but it reminds me of the sense of excitement and energy I had for traveling, for being somewhere new and different. It reminds me of the first time I forsook a grim practicality with finances and chose to go out on a limb and buy a ticket for the experience, rather than pass it up for the financial stability.

The third poster is the most important one for me, as of late.

It's an image of an androgynous shadowy figure running through the woods at twilight with a quote from Carlos Castaneda stating: "We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."

I put it on the wall next to my music stand near the door. Every morning I walk by it as I prepare for the day. Every night I glance at it as I begin a practice session. It’s in front of me as I do yoga each day.

It’s my reminder that everyday should be a step forward. It doesn't have to be a huge leap, you can inch forward by choosing to do some small thing with a positive impact on your daily life, or you can charge forward with abandon and redefine who you are. But know that if you choose to do nothing, if you choose to dwell in some sense of stasis and lethargy, you are actively making yourself miserable. Even if it feels to you as if you are simply not actively bettering yourself, you are choosing to be in a way that does not resonate with who you are.

That’s not to say that you can’t take personal days, even from yourself. Sometimes we need time to recharge.

But each day we make a choice, strength or misery, forward or backward, yes or no.

For me, today was a small step. I drafted, edited, and submitted an application to a music school in Zurich. It was only one application. It was for a position that isn’t hiring and might not even look over my information and I had to sacrifice my flute time to do it.

But I can rest easy tonight knowing that there is one more chance for employment, one more opportunity for the future, thanks to that one hour of focused work.

I can approach my yoga mat feeling calm and ready to embrace this strength – a mental fortitude or optimism and effort that will easily transfer into the physical strength required for my yoga practice.

I can sleep with a sense of accomplishment rather than a pervasive sense of unease. For the little things are what make you feel that you have control. I am not a wait-er, I am a do-er and I attribute this fact to any success I’ve had up to this point. When I begin to feel stressed butterflies soaring in my stomach before going to sleep at night I know that something needs to happen.

Even if it’s a little thing. 

A Sober October

I’ve challenged myself to quit drinking, possibly for the foreseeable future but definitely for the month of October. This challenge has been added to my previous decision to incorporate daily some form of physical exercise, flute study, French and German practice, and personal meditation. Combined with my renewed focus on proper nutrition and sleep habits and I can honestly say I've never felt better. 

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This body of mine was not intended for a desk job. I am not built to sit in one position all day long, hunched over a screen, trying to work ahead on the computer.

I can no longer spend my weekends wallowing in bed all day before leaping up to go sit on a barstool all night. My body does not appreciate those long mornings and afternoons wasted from the night before. They say drinking borrows happiness from the following days and this has never been more true. I can't continue to treat my body, the only one I will ever have, this way.

When I returned from my trek in India I had never felt better. The food I was eating was unprocessed, simplistic, and whole. I was extremely well hydrated thanks to countless cups of tea and bottles of water, and my body was being used to the peak of its physical potential. I hadn’t had a headache in two weeks and I was ecstatic.

I thought it was the food, water, and exercise. Don’t get me wrong, it was all of those things. But perhaps it was also the lack of alcohol. This next month I've decided to test that. Although I am not an alcoholic, I only drink socially on weekends and over long breaks, I am interested to see how completely eliminating alcohol from my diet will effect me. 

So far, so good. This morning I ran 8km. I did not plan it, I just woke up and felt the need to run today. So after drinking some preparatory water and having a small bowl of cereal I laced up my tennis shoes and ran out the door. I stretched myself. I opened up my stride and just let myself go. My hips, back, legs, and neck felt better and better with each step. I did some sprints for fun, to see just how long and even each pace could be, to remind myself of what my body is capable of. I listened to my body and responded by walking when my knee started to hurt. I enjoyed the morning for what it was: a pain free moment in which I could revel in the sheer physicality of my body. It was a positive, healthy, and active start to my day; a moment to breathe in the semi-fresh (read: polluted) air; a symbolic transition into a new phase of my life as I embrace health, conscious dietary choices, and a wholehearted pursuit of my career as a musician.

I feel more optimistic about my potential and my future than ever before, which is ironic considering the fact that these next few months are some of the most unstable, uncertain, and unreliable ones of my life so far.

I want to let the terrible migraines that wipe me out for days on end be the reminder to enjoy the days where I am completely healthy. I want to prove to myself that I can continue to progress and become a more accomplished musician. I want to see what happens to my body as I listen to it more fully, following what it wants and not what I do. I want to be happy.

So it's time to be selfish and do what I want for me. That time came long ago, but I didn't listen. Now I can no longer ignore it. I'm 25 years old, a quarter of a century, and my life is mine. It's time to start living my own life, rather than letting life happen to me.

You should do the same. 

because nobody is perfect

It is kind of fascinating taking a step back and analyzing your mindset and reactions towards the world around you. These last two months have been so undeniably wonderful and satisfying that it is only natural for me to be falling into a bit of a slump now that I am back to work.

But this morning I allowed myself to dwell in a negative and unhappy attitude for much longer than I normally would let happen. Everything was bothering me. The people staring at their cell phones while walking and swerving into me all over the sidewalk, the businesses with irregular hours, the elderly women slamming into me as I wait for a bus, the guys on the bus taking up three quarters of the seat and pushing me into the window. The sun. The air. The traffic.

Everything. Grated. On. Me.

I wanted to leave. If I didn’t have this bit of credit card debt I might have. Book a one way ticket, end up somewhere you want to be, propel your career forward rather than staying in this slump. These were my thoughts. As if transporting myself from here to there would magically fix my attitude. As if Korea was the problem instead of my mindset.

As if I had no control over myself, my attitude, or my future while I was in this country.

Fortunately I was able to dislodge my head from the deep crevices of my body before I ruined my entire day.

The beauty of my life is that I am living abroad, I’m surrounded by a new culture, I’m working with awesome, strange, and sometimes overwhelming schools, teachers, and students. I’m doing something that, although I don’t intend to do forever, I am able to find happiness and joy in. And I am also able to look forward to the future and move myself in a direction I can be proud of.

Sometimes all I want is to let myself dwell in negativity and unhappiness. Wishing I were somewhere else, wishing I was doing something else, wishing for something other than I have, regardless of what it is. But this is such a wasted energy and ambition because when I am in that magical “other place” I am going to have the same bad days, the same mornings waking up on the wrong side of the bed and slamming my head against the wall, the same unhappiness. What matters is how I turn those days around.

If my experiences here were really terrible, if nothing made me happy and I had no reason to stay - I would not hesitate to hop on a plane. If I found something else that I wanted to do, something that was more focused on me and my dreams and passions I would take less than two hours to pack all of my things and be out of this country. If there was no reason for me to stay then I would be gone.

But there are so many reasons for me to be where I am. Even if sometimes that reason is simply to remind myself that I don’t need to live an ideal, utopian life in order to be happy, or to tell myself that I can keep my focus and passion moving forward regardless of personal circumstances. There are so many reasons for me to be where I am.

Sometimes I just need to tell myself to be happy and yes, it’s as simple as that.

But it helps when some of your classes are cancelled and your students are all taking a giant ballet lesson in the auditorium. Really, Korea? Sometimes you know exactly how to make my day.

Living Unapologetically

I'm not the first expatriate, immigrant, or tourist to find myself treading carefully in a new culture. The last thing I want to do is offend the people that are my neighbors, no matter how long I intend to stay in a certain place. Whether a week in India, a year in Busan, or a lifetime in the states, I have always tried to live my life in a way that is harmonious to the lives of others around me. Courtesy. Empathy. Compassion. I don't want to make someone feel uncomfortable because of something I have said or done.

This mindset has never before bubbled so close to the surface with such consistency as it has the last six months here in Korea. I've been careful about how I eat, what I eat, what I wear, where I put my chopsticks after my meal, how I greet people. Almost every element of daily life that I take for granted when home I have been hypersensitive to as I find myself in such a drastically different place.

I'm not saying that is not a bad thing. That is how I have learned to live in the Korean way (or as close to it as a non-Korean speaking foreigner can).

However, at some point I have let this sensitivity to these cultural differences stop me from living my life. I have let my new city stop me from doing the things I want to do to live forward and work ahead in my career.

As this page is titled, I am a wandering musician. I play the flute. I am a classically trained orchestral musician. With this title comes a huge responsibility: practicing. Practicing daily. Practicing when you don't want to. Practicing the things that sound terrible. Running drills, scales, arpeggios. Technical work that I love. Long tones that are low. Long tones that are high. Long tones that seem like they will never end. Breathing exercises. Yoga. Meditation.

The first six months in Korea I barely touched my flute. I felt a bit lost. I was caught up trying to figure out my future career because I was ignoring the one that I truly loved. I was trying to change who I am into something I'm not.

This is not Koreas fault. I am not blaming my location.

Instead it was a complex culmination of countless different factors that have been building since before I finished my Masters degree. But therein lies a different blogpost.

Right now I'm looking forward. I've stopped being afraid of offending my neighbors and have picked up my instrument again. I'm applying for festivals, masterclasses, and orchestral auditions. I'm practicing (within decent hours), I'm exercising (outside of those decent hours), and I'm living my life in the truest form that I can.

You see I'm still being sensitive to my neighbors. I don't play my flute before 8 am or after 9 pm. I refrain from high piccolo work in my apartment (because really, nobody deserves that torture). I'm still conscious of cultural difference and carry myself in a way that resonates with these new cultural norms. But I am no longer changing all of who I am to make sure that others are happy. This was never my intention, but it was essentially what was happening.

It's time for me to do me. It's time for me to live shamelessly because that is who I am.

It's time to live unapologetically.

On Perspective: Waking Up in the Middle of the Bed

I often get terrible migraines. The type of headache that make you feel like you're going to vomit, that make your eyes throb and your teeth hurt. These headaches can last for days at a time and leave you in fear that they might recur at a moments notice.

My migraines are triggered by many things: what I eat, how much I drink, what I drink, how much sleep I've gotten, whether or not my neck is out of alignment, and sometimes they strike for what seems like no reason at all. It starts out harmlessly enough - a slight tension in the neck and head, a flicker of light, an inexplicable feeling of dread. But soon my eyes begin to feel sore and heavy, my temples start to throb, my forehead (just above the sinuses) begins to feel thick and tight. The migraine has begun.

The problem is that I get headaches frequently - it's even become a bit of a joke with my friends. "Oh, sorry, I can't have that. Red food dye gives me migraines," I'll say as they roll their eyes. There's always a bit of a headache hidden behind my thick skull, so it's easy for me to mistake these regular headaches for an incoming migraine.

After so many years you would think I would know better. Unfortunately my body is constantly changing, what was once a trigger is no longer, and what is a trigger now may never have been a problem before. This causes a host of new problems when I find myself, say, in Korea experiencing a new culture and environment - a new climate, new diet, new physical demands on my body, new everything - each of these exciting new experiences have the potential to be a new trigger.

But this is where the durability of the human body and mind reasserts itself.

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I woke up in the middle of the bed. You know, there's a wrong side and a right side. The crab-ass in line at Starbucks woke up on the wrong side; the whistling jolly woman woke up on the right. But here I was, in the middle and not sure which way I would turn.

On one hand I had just awaken from an eleven hour migraine-induced slumber. My neck was tight, my head felt raw, and I was more than a little afraid to move. On the other hand, I was awake. I no longer felt tears running down my face from the pressure in my skull. It was a new day.

I stood up. This is always the first test. Does standing make the blood rush through your body re-establishing the throbbing, pounding pain? Today it didn't. Bathroom break. Back to the bed. Sit down. There. I had just stood up twice and sat down twice and the headache hadn't returned. Success.

The right side it is.

 A big breakfast followed by a delicious homemade latte left me the smiling fool walking to the bus. The world was clear, lacking the migraine haze, I was happy. 

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It's amazing to me how such pain can leave me feeling so happy the next day. It's as if my body attacks itself as a way of reminding me how fortunate I am. By crippling me and leaving me craving the merest of essentials (water, adequate food, sleep) it allows me to appreciate the rest of my experiences.

The migraine that I loathe, the pain that I hate, and the experiences that I could do without never cease to remind me of the beauty in the world. It sounds cliched and it probably is, but without those negative and awful experiences I wouldn't be as ready to marvel in the mundane.

I hate to say it, but sometimes I'm grateful for my migraines. They force me to remind myself to take care of my body, to release the tension and stress from my perspective, and to appreciate the world for what it is - a hard and relentless place where one can find beauty and pain. Happiness and stress.

We have the choice. We all have different problems, whether physical or mental, and we all struggle with them at times. But I've learned that I have two options: I can dwell on the negative and wish things were different, or I can allow for the bad things to happen and let them remind me of all of the good things. I can do my best to make sure that the migraines don't return, but at some point I will slip-up, something will happen that I don't expect, or my body will change again and I"ll have a host of new triggers to look out for. But I can be happy, even with all of that.

It all depends on which side of the bed I decide to roll onto when I wake up in the morning.

Growing Pains

There's something about this city that fascinates me. Perhaps it's the sheer size and magnitude of the sprawling metropolis. Or maybe it's the densely packed population, the reality that there  is always someone on the streets, no matter when you find yourself there. But no, it's something else. For me, an expat situated on the outskirts of Busan, the most intriguing element of this city can be found in what I refer to as its growing pains.

It's easy to be drawn to the two most obvious elements of the city: the new and the old. The countless identical Lotte Apartment complexes, Lotte Department stores, Centum City, skyscrapers, and technology, sharply juxtaposed against the temples, traditional markets, and Buddhist sensibility of the culture. The old character weaves its way through the mind of the older generation, seeping into portions of the younger generations psyche, leaving strong indications that it might be lost within a few generations.

However, these two sides are not where you find the growing pains. Instead you can see these pains when you look up at the complex cobweb of countless electrical wires hanging low over the street - placed there from the necessity of supplying electricity and power to the surrounding buildings but ignoring the foresight of future growth and demands. What was once a clean set of two or three electrical lines has now become a heavy, unwieldy web of electrical power that is slowly succumbing to gravity and descending lower and lower to the streets.

The growing pains are seen in the perpendicular bend of the elderly ajummas spine from years spent toiling in the field as she hauls huge carts of recycling,picking up the trash thrown onto streets, moving the refuse from one spot to another.

You can see it in the strip malls where construction overstepped demand and left behind the tattered remains of closed storefronts. This reflection of an obstinate focus on growth, the demand for more - more buildings, more shops, more, more, more - makes you wonder when this aesthetic of utility and quantity will be replaced by the aesthetic of art and quality.

These are the growing pains of an ancient civilization that has suffered immensely but has managed to raise itself up from abject poverty and colonial rule to a force of capitalism, consumerism, and productivity in a very brief span of time.

The more time I spend immersed in this complex and captivating culture, the more that this complexity seems to be a reflection of my own inner struggles. The responsible consumer obsessed with repaying her student loans is synonymous with the new face of Korea. Consumerism, capitalism, utilitarianism - this is contrasted with a wholly different side of my personality. The lingering light of culture, art, and beauty within Busan captures my dream of living life for the sake of living - not dwelling on financial demands and hardships; enjoying my life for what it could be rather than paying for what it has been.

Busan is reaching a turning point. Soon its citizens will have to make a conscious choice between aesthetic purpose and capitalist progress. The massive construction of identical buildings, apartments, stores, and businesses is not sustainable. It seems to me that this city has lifted itself up and created a bustling landscape but that it now needs to focus on the future and what it wants to define itself as. An identity crisis is coming, what will it choose?

It seems that I too am being compelled to make a choice of this kind. How will I live my life? What kind of life will that be? The more time I spend away from that which is familiar is helpful, but I can only run for so long before I need to make a decision of my own.

All those who wander are not lost, but some of us are.

friday morning

you wake up early to finish planning lessons for that day - you procrastinated a bit too much, even for you.

your bialetti wasn’t tight enough and your espresso sprayed all over your counter. the milk was too hot, the foam doesn’t sit right. you slipped in the shower and hit your funny bone on the towel rack. you can’t find your clothes and have no food for breakfast.

krispy kreme it is - you check your calendar. you realize that you’ll be on your period in india. you are glad you decided to go with the all women’s trekking agency. e-mail asking them for advice. look at pictures of the area. get excited again.

you left too early, your bus won’t be for another 15 minutes. more coffee it is. iced latte. tall. 고맙습니다, Starbucks lady. you sip it. you smile.

but wait, why is there such a large group of people waiting for the bus? you are one of the last ones on, there’s no room to stand. your laptop feels heavy. you try not to hit the elderly man in the face with your bag. the air conditioning is not on. no windows are opened. sweat begins to trickle down your spine.

gradually being pushed to the back of the bus. propelled as far back as possible. an ajumma smiles at you. you smile back, 안녕하세요. she pats her lap, asking for your bag. 고맙습니다, you hand it to her. now you can stand semi-comfortably.

the vice principal is calling the other teacher with you - where are you? explanations.

people gradually get off the bus. you have to fight forward when your stop is called. you almost get trapped, the door starts to close, you frantically push and squeeze forward. you hop out laughing now. you make eye contact with your colleague, he laughs too. he explains. too many people. more smiles.

rush into school, set up your laptop - lessons to plan, things to do! too much coffee, dehydrated. you jog upstairs to find water. everyone is in a circle laughing. good morning. the shy teacher turns to you and blurts out “plum!” she smiles and covers her face, embarrassed.

you enjoy the plum. you chitchat. you get water and slowly walk downstairs.

your lessons are almost done, time to print. but wait. your CoTeacher is back. lessons are all cancelled, she has a different plan for the students. you act disappointed, you are disappointed, but you smile and agree.

sometimes you wake up early, mess up your coffee, rush out the door only to be packed onto a bus with too many people. you are late to school, unprepared, and sweating profusely already. sometimes people greet you with a smile and an effort at conversation, they share their fruit and offer coffee. you realize everything worked out.

sometimes you are glad you wound up here, even after a terrible week.

sometimes Korea isn’t so bad, after all.