The Day I Missed

This would have to be pluralized, actually.  I left early Friday for Idaho where my family lives to see my youngest sister in one of the star roles of the community musical.  Some unexpected personal and family situations came up that left me not getting back until just before I had to go to work tonight - Monday.  I'm sad this left me missing two days of class and put me quite a bit behind in all my work in general, but a lot of life and family things outside of my little scholarly world needed to be done and I'm glad they happened.  It's interesting how much this seems to relate to our topic of conversation in class today, and the article about time.  I enjoyed reading the article and thinking of different areas or situations in life where I have been placed in both kinds of time, and what my preferred behavior is.

Another thing I have recently been doing more is reading up on all the other field study student blogs.  This has not only been interesting and inspiring with regards to my own project and thoughts on going abroad, but became very useful today as many students have already written about class discussion that happened and I don't feel quite as much like I missed out.

When I lived abroad it could be said that in general people lived on P-time.  I lived in a world still dictated by a sense of M-time, making schedules and keeping appointments etc. and yet we did everything according to the people around us and their P-time.  It took me a while to get used to not making specific return appointments.  We would decide the day before where to go the next day and hope that they would be around.  We became familiar with their schedules and times of day when people would be certain places so we could find them.  If something stopped us along the way, it stopped us, so be it.  If people were not there, we found a neighbor or someone standing nearby to talk with instead and if anything I would say these methods never hindered the progress of our meetings with any particular people too drastically, and if anything helped our kind of work progress more on the whole - but it still took me getting used to.

I'm wondering how much setting up teaching times where I am going will require me to have schedule flexibility or be rigid in my time management.  At times I'm sure it will require both of me but learning the living habits of the Tibetan's in Bylakuppe will be another necessary part of working out my day to day plans and teaching opportunities.