Even Sanctuaries Have Management

End of the day, end of the month, and honestly, I'm reaching for something good to say and coming up a little short.

Whether it's the school, the weather, or simply me, I can't say. But this week has made it genuinely hard to find joy in the practice. In some ways, I feel further from the truth I came here hoping for, and maybe that's exactly the point, some unseen test waiting at the end, a rite of passage disguised as frustration. I don't know. In the end, it hardly matters what shape it takes. The last two years have had plenty of steep climbs and descents. This might just be another one asking to be ridden out.

The thing I keep circling, confused, is the spiritual side of this whole journey. It's felt thin for a while now, and this week it feels almost entirely absent. That could easily be on me. But the school's attention lately, my class especially, seems fixed on a medal at a local competition. Good for whoever wins it, but set against the bigger picture, the sheer weight being placed on one external goal feels out of step with the quieter traditions this school was built on.

Maybe it's cultural. Maybe I'm simply missing something obvious. Either way, I find myself searching for understanding again, and perhaps that searching is itself the actual lesson, proof of something in me still waiting to be worked on, still needing to be grown.

Worth sitting with honestly, because external things are affecting me more than they should at this stage, and that doesn't track with where I thought I'd landed. This place has always felt like a sanctuary. But even sanctuaries run on management, on systems, on compromises, I somehow managed not to notice until now. My expectations ran too high. That's on me, not the school.

Tomorrow I'm turning off the thinking entirely and just watching, everything in front of me,  especially myself.

Maybe imperfection is the whole shape of perfection, after all.