"He who would leap high must take a long run"

9/3/09

So it has officially been a week since I landed in Tisovec, and in that week I have vacillated across a broad spectrum of attitudes and frames of mind. One moment I’ll be elated as I look out my window and see a flock of sheep grazing on the plush, green hillsides while the shepherd and his dog stand nearby, or I laugh with some of the faculty in the staffroom and work on my Slovak. At other times though I’m bored stiff, at a complete and utter loss for ideas of how to occupy my time.
Like many Americans, (gotta love that puritan work ethic…) I am a doer. I’m used to motion and activity, and as type-A as it sounds, being able to cross things off of lists. Even this past summer, which I spent in the woods, each day we had to accomplish something, even if it was just packing up camp and walking to the next place to pitch out tents. The other day I went for a hike and I saw so many people working out in their gardens, harvesting potatoes and doing general maintenance. I had pangs of nostalgia for picking pine needles out of my mother’s seemingly endless rock beds, or working with tools myself on a trial maintenance crew on the Colorado Trail. I wanted so badly to go work with the random strangers, pull a few weeds, man a hoe, whatever—I just wanted to feel like I had something to do, to feel used.
Now don’t get me wrong, I know how to chill out too. All this free time has allowed me to explore plenty of the surrounding hills (so awesome! See pics…), have a paragliding adventure, and finally get some pleasure reading done. I’ve also been getting more sleep on a nightly basis than I probably have in years, so I’m sure my body is stoked. But I still feel like I’m in a holding tank—classes won’t start regularly until next week (this week is lots of orientation-type stuff and half days) and since I am a teaching assistant and will not have any classes of my own, I don’t even have lesson plans to create. When I arrive at school each morning Helena, the principle, just says to me, “Well, I’m sorry you will have more free time…” I never thought I’d dread free time so much.
As I was making a cup of tea yesterday though, I got TOLD by some teabag wisdom. Lately I’ve been into Good Earth tea, each bag of which comes equipped with a complimentary little something to ponder. At the time I was feeling particularly reflective, and my teabag said, “He who would leap high must take a long run.” BAM. Does it get any more in-your-face than that? I didn’t come away from four years of crew empty-handed, I know all about analogies, metaphors, processes, and delayed gratification!
Before I got here I was all talk about how great living in the tiniest town ever was going to be, especially when pitted against nay-sayers. After experiencing it for a little while though I became sort of disenchanted, this isn’t how I imagined it... But I have to put in the legwork to ease my way into this place. I had all these delusions-a-grandeur about how magical my time here was going to be; but I need to get acclimated, follow that process, and learn how to wait and be still before much of that plan comes to fruition. I need to be alone a little, be bored, confused—basically I need to wrack up some brutal training runs before that perfect, stellar, euphoric leap.