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As I was walking home from my Saturday gig today I had a very basic realization (embarrassingly basic, but important to face up to): my priorities are all out of order and so my view of life is distorted, resulting in bad decisions and bad results. At this moment the final exams I need to write for school are very late, I'm also skirting personal/family responsibilities, my diet sucks and it's keeping me sick, I'm unable to quit smoking entirely, I'm too easily slipping into bad moods, and I'm not making the progress as a teacher I would like to quickly enough, mostly because of crappy work habits. That's just some of the real life stuff.
Then there's this forum. It sucks up plenty of time and attention. It's a bit of an addiction because it's often fun, sometimes informative, often hilarious...overall quite mysteriously, deeply engaging. I've also made some good friends though it and count many of the posters here as 'virtual friends' whatever that means. But at this point it mostly fills a whole that shouldn't really be there. Instead of calling up a friend to chat, I'll login. Instead of writing an email to an old friend, I'll get the instant gratification of chatting with folks on here. It's a filler that ends up blocking all kinds of potentials because it becomes so habitual and really adds up in terms of time and attention.
I've also noticed how negative and even caustic I'm becoming on here. With all too much regularity I'll look at a post I've made and think "shit, when did I turn into fucking Cyrille?"I'm often going on the offensive and questioning posters in not so compassionate ways and so I've got people attacking me on various threads...and so I leave myself completely open to nasty people taking advantage of my general lack of anonymity. I'm glad I've had the chance to share my travels and experiences here from being a total newbie teacher in Thailand to being an established TEFL hack, married, doling out housing advice and flaming newbies for their total cluelessness. I came in good faith and I leave as a regular poster here in good faith, 12,000 posts later.
And that should be a wrap. A wrap as a "regular poster" getting stuck into all the various debates, flames, issues, commentary about design flaws, games threads, pattaya news updates, and complete randomness. It's all too perfect of a way to very enjoyably waste time online. Hell, I was even asking Louis if he needed another mod, doing that again. But someone please kill me if I'm wasting time on here anymore after this very post. Call me a useless hypocrite. Red me. Flame the hell out of me. There is simply too much to do to spend any more time keeping up with the antics of Mr Mister or finding out what Robi is listening to right now.
So, those of you on here who I actually know, expect more actual contact. Those of you who I don't know, please continue to enjoy the wonders of the Ajarn Forum. It's a great place, and I'll continue to log on occasionally to check out what's on the chopping block, especially what relates to teaching here.
It has taken me 28 minutes to write all of this. I hope those are the last 28 minutes I lose speaking into the virtual echo chamber of this forum without clear practical purpose!
The feeling that welled up in my on my walk home today is reminiscent of a Pali language term found in the Buddhist scriptures, samvega. This can be translated as 'chastened dispassion' and describes a deep feeling of disgust with one's usual way of doing things (in this case specifically wasting precious time). I wasn't thinking about posting on Ajarn at the time, but all the other wasteful habits that do violence to my own happiness. But when I got home and noticed myself itching to hop online before a couple of other things I needed to do, it struck me that this is actually kind of a biiig one. Samvega might be a grandiose term for it but I'm just itching to explode some of my ineffectualness and get on with gettin' 'er done as GWB used to say.
So...
Cue Hales with the usual!
I've loved being that regular poster here. Thanks to all for a great time.
And if I can't kick the habit, I'll have just added a rather epic example to the pile of 'I'm leaving!' threads by posters who didn't quite follow through with their grand exclamations of escapism.
)
Originally Posted by Matthew
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