1/2

Yesterday was the half way point of my time in Japan. Despite how cliché it sounds it really has gone faster than I expected. I’ve found myself in similar situations before, being faced with a task which at the beginning seems enormous and undoable but progressively becomes less daunting as time goes on. I said it to myself when I started secondary school; “there will come a point after all the endless hours of study and stress where everything else falls away and at the climax it will be just me and an exam and I’ll be staring back at the better part of a decade that has just flown by, wondering how time could have gone so fast and yet so slow”. I may not have said it in as refined a way as I was twelve but the thought was definitely in my mind. This warped perception of time however often leaves me looking back and thinking that it all went so fast. I said it when I finished school, I’ll say it when this year is over and more than likely I’ll say it on my death bed.

I’ve learned many things from my time here so far but perhaps two that resonate especially strongly with me are that the world is not as big a place as one thinks it is and that time will slip by you if you do not make the conscious effort to do something with it.  Far too many Sunday evenings in the past I’ve found myself  drifting into conscious thought as I stared longingly out a window thinking “Why didn’t I do something worthwhile with my time or try something new or do something meaningful even if it was just as simple as acknowledging a homeless mans existence with a brief nod and a two Euro coin in his cup”. In the past it was my weekends that we’re my free time, where I wasn’t constrained by obligations or tasks that were a means to an end. Now however as I’m becoming older and gaining more control over my own life I see that freedom that was once restricted to my weekends extending into the rest of my time. It’s dawned on me that being white and middle class means that I have more opportunities and potential than many less fortunate people around the globe could ever hope for and with so much opportunity laying before me I cannot and I will not let myself slip quietly into the Sunday evening of my life whilst starring back at the time gone by and asking myself the same questions that I would on any other Sunday.