Korea: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

“Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”

 

Friends back home like to ask questions like "What weird things have you eaten?" but here the most common question you are asked by Koreans and foreigners alike is "What made you come to Korea?" or one of the ten variations of that very question.  Now don't think I am not just as guilty of asking the same question.  In my head I expected the foreign community (read: non-Koreans) to be mostly American, and appreciate things like Chick-fila and queso.  But I got here and have never been anywhere before where I was able to encounter so many different people from so many different places.  I've met Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders/Kiwis, South Africans, Nigerians, Irish, and the list goes on.  I thought my lesson on culture and the world was simply going to be from a Korean standpoint.  I was wrong.

“It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.”  

But regardless of where they are from, every one of them packed their life into a suitcase, woke up, boarded a plane, and moved to an unknown country leaving the life they knew behind.  That one event, ties every foreigner in Korea together in a unique way.  We all made the decision to leave a life in our respective countries to do life differently here.  So it can be intriguing as to what would make any person crazy enough to leave family, friends, pets, jobs, and the known...for that which is unknown. 

“The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.”  

Most people start their travel blog with their first post being when they decide to leave and explain why.  I am not blog savvy so I waited until Korea to make my first post.  Now that life has slowed me down, I think it may be important to back up and explain why just a little bit better.

“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation."

In my head I've always been a big dreamer. I'd stay up at night with plans of how to change the world as if I was smarter than everyone and the answer to the world's problems were just a 2am cup of coffee away.  In my head I've also always been adventurous and exciting, but I had no stripes to prove it.  Instead I sat on the couch in my apartment with my dogs and read the blogs of my friends who were half way around the world and doing amazing things.  I would then spend hours looking up and researching all the things I could possibly do around the world, but then make up excuses about how I have a car payment, an apartment lease, dogs, a career...I was responsible! (read: fear).  Most of my other friends never settled themselves making the transient life easy.  I had roots planted already, my trajectory was set. Fear would have me live a boring life.  (boring for me...don't be offended friends with kids and diapers and gymnastics practice.)

At 18, I would have told you that at 30 I would be married and have a kid.  At 22, I had plans to make a difference and change the world (or at least whatever community I was living in).  I was ambitious. A husband and kids are just an expected part of adulthood and a step in life that everyone reaches.  So I too penciled it into my 20's.  So I went about making plans for my future always expecting that I needed to account for certain things. I had long term goals but hadn't mapped out a plan to achieve them as I was still waiting for all the things life tells me are supposed to happen when you're 25 and 26.  I knew I'd one day go to grad school but thought, it will be easier when I'm married and have a second income...I'll wait.  And plan after plan was being dictated by the sense that I was always waiting on life to start.  What I didn't realize was that I was wasting my life waiting on a life that didn't exist to start.

Then I read a book.  A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.  (hear the heavens open and the angels sing.  This was the aha moment) It is all about life and how to live a better story but not in a self help kind of way, but a literary/take action kind of way.  I read the contents of the book in about 36 hours, and when I finished I wanted to climb a mountain, run a race, talk to everyone I passed on the street, do all the things I was always too afraid to do, and start living the life that I had.  I wanted a better story and I wanted to be the heroine, not the supporting actress in my own story. 

So a short time after that, I applied for grad school with 48 hours to meet the deadline.  I got accepted and quit my job with no real plan on how to support myself through grad school.  I called home and asked my family if someone would take me and my dogs in so that I would not go into more debt than necessary.  Finally life was beginning to move again. When I graduated with my masters all my grad school friends started excitedly looking for that big job and responsibility (as many were fresh out of college to begin with) and I panicked.  I didn't want to go back to the same 9-5 job where I question if I was making a difference and if this is what the 22yo version of me expected when I was going to conquer the world.  I wanted to feel alive, and an apartment lease and job similar to what I had wasn't going to do it this time.  I needed to keep moving forward. 

“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.”  

So the plan was to travel, it's what I've always wanted to do.  But I was fearful so I wanted to stay safe.  I'd go to the UK and do social work. But thanks to recently changed Visa restrictions that was no longer as easy as it was in years past.  But I was determined to uproot and go, just wasn't sure where. So once I opened to the idea of teaching English as a mode of travel, I just had to decide on a country.  Asian countries were all at the bottom of my list, but doors kept shutting.  Then came a book/documentary "Half the Sky".  I highly recommend reading it or watching the 6 hr documentary that is now on Netflix.  It has nothing to do with teaching English, but I fell I love with Cambodia and Vietnam and suddenly I had a new outlook on wanting to love me some Asians and travel southeast Asia.  Korea happened to be the easiest, safest, and best paying countries for teaching English and seemed like a perfect start to seeing how a girl from small town Texas who has always lived within 2 hours from home would do without the safety of family, friends, smiling strangers, and diners that serve sweet tea and gravy with everything. 

So Korea wasn't my plan, nor was teaching English.  But I was a 29 year old social worker from Texas who wasn't married (gasp) and didn't have kids, and suddenly found that I had en entire life waiting to be lived and ground soft enough to uproot with little disruption.  So I packed my back, told my family and friends I loved them, and boarded a plane for the unknown and started living.  I live in Gwangju Korea, I ate my birthday cake with chopsticks, and I'm happy!

“Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.”  

 

 

**All quotes in italics are from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller.  You can find Half the Sky at any bookstore or again the documentary on Netflix. It's about oppression around the world so don't expect a cute doc about penguins or koala bears.  **