One Week

Countdown to departure: 7 days
Countdown to culture shock: 192 days

I will go to Beijing alone and work as a private tutor. The arrangements are more or less in place: I get my visa on Wednesday, and I have given notice at work (my last day is Thursday), Tom will have his friends whisk me off to the apartment when I arrive, and then send the first couple of clients my way; from that point, I'll have to find the rest of my clients on my own. Fortunately I already have a handful of contacts in Beijing to help me out.

My personal growth the past couple weeks has moved beyond meditation to real life lessons. Damaging my parents' car twice in that span of time is distressing to the point of hilarity; the first incident ate up all of the funds I had meant to use for my travelling expenses, the second has left me in debt to both my brother and my best friend. But dealing with a brush with death and that encumbering sense of regret that comes with game-changing mistakes easily avoided have left me wiser to an extent that could very possibly save my life in a place where risky choices will be all-too-tempting to make. And I find comfort in that.

So let my last week begin. Here goes nothing.

Pre-Closure

Countdown to departure: 14 days?
Countdown to culture shock: 199 days?

I cannot enumerate all of the various ups-and-downs in my preparations that have happened since my last post. Suffice it to say, the statement, "every day I wake up, my life gets more complicated," has continued to ring true. I'm holding a conference call with my boss and some of my Chinese friends tomorrow night to try to get things cleared up once and for all.

The aspect of the complications relevant to the question marks above is thus: the delays in my visa application have introduced the possibility that I will have to change my flight to a later date. Unfortunately, the super-cheap ticket I found was at the very tail end of the off-season; consequently, the fee for changing it would run in the order of $500 (which, if you recall, was the cost of the ticket itself). There are plenty of pros to changing my ticket, but it would be nice to just have this over with as-is.

By tomorrow I'll probably have an idea of how things are going to play out.

The Story Thus Far

Countdown to departure: 18 days
Countdown to culture shock: 203 days

The story thus far is that every day I wake up, my life gets more complicated. While walking home from work, I found the solution to a lot of the questions I've been asking myself in the same place I usually do (and yet it somehow always seems to surprise me) - I took a different route. With all of the things on my plate, it dawned on me on this particular walk (amid the smells of gravel and cherry trees) that I need to start laughing stuff off. When I first started studying Taoism, I jotted down these lines:

To learn a little about Tao
Take what I write into your heart
And laugh

To learn much about Tao
Take what I don't write into your heart
And laugh some more

And this is the thing. I can look at the things in my life and justly classify them as irksome, interesting, providential or all-too-typical, but unless "funny" is in that list, I'm not going to know peace. And frankly, it is funny that just when I thought I would have enough money to make all this work, I went and did a few hundred dollars of damage to my parents' car. It's funny that my visa application has gotten so wrapped up in red tape that I may have to rethink all of my plans. And it's certainly funny that worrying about these things has left me so scatterbrained that I tried to order a lunch special from a restaurant at 8:15 this evening, and then had to be reminded by the waiter to pay a tip when I left.

And I'm not being sarcastic in the least. Whatever comes of these plotlines, they'll bust a gut when I tell my grandchildren about them.

UPDATE: I think this is an apt illustration of what I've been thinking about.