I try to do that in general, but today I was especially attuned to it, having just finished the book, and ended up having a wonderful day filled with beautiful serendipities and other happy things.
I had the feeling when I woke up that I should go to work a little early. I had nothing extra to do, but felt that I should go to the teacher's office. I walked in, signed my class record form and was almost immediately approached by a Thai teacher who asked if I would like to work privately with a student on her speaking skills for 2 hours/week and how did 300 baht/hour sound? This is to a T, exactly the kind of extra work I have been looking for! It was amazing.
Later, I went to the English department mini-library that I had heard about from other teachers and came across several books that I have been meaning to read (I'm taking it upon myself to read all the books I "should have" read but never did, so if you have any suggestions please leave them in the comments!) like Pride & Prejudice, Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, Ana Karenina and others.
After than I found a gorgeous, shady running spot, and had a luxurious swim in the pool at my apartment.
In class I had a sudden feeling that I should scrap the prescribed lesson, and asked my students what they would like to do. "Play Games!"
yeah, me too... so we played Hangman which segued easily into an impromptu lesson about pronunciation, compound words, minimal pairs and the IPA, with their fingers on their throats figuring out whether a sound was voiced or voiceless. My students were the most responsive I've ever seen them; I would even say they were having fun! My favorite moment was when a student who had never said a word in class before blurted out the answer to the hangman problem (it seemed almost without realizing it because he looked shocked at himself) and the whole class cheered for him.
I went to my swing dancing class and out for dinner with one of the women after. At a table next to us was a man dining alone, I got a feeling that I should talk him so I asked if he would like to join us. He turned out to be a wonderful person who was working on similar issues as my friend and we all talked for hours. On the way back to my motorbike (which I had inexplicable parked far away because I got the sudden urge to walk the rest of the way to the restaurant), I ran into a friend from school who invited me up for coffee and we had a lovely chat as well.
All in all, a beautiful day which fully reinforced my faith in omens, "coincidences," seredipities and listening to my heart.
1 comment:
There's this poem you should read, Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden.
Books you should read are A Clockwork Orange ("Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts. But, as they say, money isn't everything..."), 1984, East of Eden, Walden 2 (very strange, not that well written, but worth the read), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Arcadia ("Septimus, what is carnal embrace?" "Carnal embrace, my dear, is the act of hugging a side of beef") Catch 22, A Heart of Darkness, The Stranger, Slaughterhouse 5, and Cat's Cradle. I'm sure you've read several of these, but all of these books are great reads, and some have really impacted my life. Good Luck!
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