It’s mid September. My plan is to quit working as an ALT at the end of March next year. Six months left.

However, there have been a couple of complications since I started preparing to quit. For one, the studio that my wife and I built got flooded during a recent storm. While most valuables in the house were left undamaged, the studio itself stinks badly of mold. There are a lot of places in the studio for mold to hide. The flood was a rather large setback for us. I wanted to have English lessons in there, but unless we can fix the smell, having lessons in there won’t be practical.

On top of that, I have personal compatibility issues with the mother-in-law, so my wife and I have decided to move out into an apartment. That means we’ll be saving less money than we are now.

Those challenges have prompted me to reevaluate my plans.

My feeling was that if I could replace about 25% of my current salary with part-time, personal work, then it would be feasible for me to quit. But given these new circumstances, I feel like I need to raise that to 50%.

That’s a substantial amount of money. How can I possibly make that much?

The original plan I had was to have at least 5 lessons a week. That sounded like an achievable goal.

10 lessons a month? Now that’s a real challenge. 

How will I do it?

I have no idea.

It’s times like these that I am reminded of a scene from my favorite manga, Attack on Titan. During a pivotal point in the series, a small group of soldiers are sent to do something that had never been done before: Win a battle against the Titans. The fate of humanity rested on them.

The only way they could win and thereby save humanity was to use an experimental power they discovered. Unfortunately, almost as soon as the battle started, it looked like the experimental power failed. When they realized that, they sent a signal that the mission had failed. The mission failed almost as quickly as it begun.

When the commander of the army got the signal, his advisers asked him to order the troops to abort the mission and retreat. His response?

No.

“I won’t let them admit failure so easily. All that we can do while we are alive is struggle through this.”

The troops on the ground began to panic. Most of them wanted to retreat, but their commander ordered them to stay. They had to protect the people with the experimental power until they could escape.

In other words, they had to struggle against a seemingly invincible enemy, the weight of the future of humanity on their shoulders.

There are times in life when we don’t know what to do. In those times, all we can do is struggle through the fear and doubt. We can’t run away or accept failure. We have to fight.

That’s the burden we are given from the day we’re born until the day we die.

Time to rise to the occasion.