STANDING AND WAITING

“Thousands […] speed, /

[…] o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also [live] who only stand and wait.”

-- John Milton, “On His Blindness”

     As the years have passed, I have become far more interested in standing and waiting than in speeding and dashing and rushing hither and yon. All my speeding around over the first many years of my life yielded little more than partially busted plans, headaches from hell, and a slowly disappearing sense of success. I lived in a relentless and insistent way, working ferociously against any and all obstacles to pursue my private goals, giving little heed to the need for some silence and peace every so often. I was a rusher and dasher of the first order, flinging myself along the roads of my life “without rest”, as Milton puts it. In my late 40’s, however, something happened that slowed me down and spoke to me about the importance of sometimes simply waiting and watching. I grew weary and bored with the high-speed pace of my life, and, instead of always racing around, I began to occasionally allow the wide world to work on me in its gracious ways. “Allow” is the special word there, for my life did, in fact, begin to be more about allowing -- or letting -- than doing and getting. I began to take pleasure in simply standing and observing the surprises that happened around me -- and now,  more and more, all things seem to me to be surprises. Waiting has become a sort of way of life for me – just waiting to see what wonders will happen next. I guess, now, I’m rather finished with speeding around. It brought me no blessings that I know of, and standing and waiting, at least now and then, has become a worthwhile way to live.
 

GETTING ABOARD

At the start of each English class, I feel like I'm climbing aboard the big, bright train that takes my students and me for refreshing rides each day. I plan precise lessons for each class, but I can't help but believe that something besides my brain brings us through the good land of learning. I feel like some kind of colossal engine far ahead of us is always working with smoothness and muscle to make the learning happen. All the kids and I have to do is get aboard and watch for the wonders.

THOUGHTS IN STYLISH RIBBONS

When I discovered this morning that the word "finish" derives from the same Latin root that gives us "fine", it got me thinking about all the fine finish lines my students and I cross in each class. We create thoughts by the thousands as we think our way through the assignments, lessons, and literature we're working with, and all those thoughts are fine just as they are. They may not be the thoughts that "deep thinkers" think, or that college professors praise, or that produce a perfect set of grades for class, but they are the thoughts that came to us, and therefore they are fine just as they are. They are finished, you might say -- as sensible and polished as possible at this particular moment. Can they shift and transform and become thoroughly different thoughts? Of course, but that doesn't mean the new thoughts are any better or brighter or finer -- just newer. Each of our English class thoughts comes wrapped in the stylish ribbons of the present moment, and each, in a sense, crosses the finish line of thinking in celebratory triumph. It's like our minds during English class are playing-fields where robust and successful thoughts -- which is all of them -- are finishing races with a fine kind of flair.

RUNNING WITH PATIENCE

"Runner", oil on brown paper, by Robin Weiss

During a day at school, I often feel like I’m racing around with reckless eagerness, scurrying toward various finish lines, but sometimes, fortunately for me, I am able to run my school-day races with a kind of settled and satisfying patience. It might seem strange to think of racing patiently, but it’s begun to make sense to me, especially when I recall a long-distance runner I used to watch when I was an apprentice runner in high school. This fellow seemed to flow around the track as he ran; instead of struggling to run fast, he seemed to simply allow the fast running to spontaneously happen. It was as if he wasn’t working at all when he ran – as if something called “running” was doing the work, and he was just joining in the effortless amusement of it all. Early in a long race, he was often close to last in the field, but gradually, as if with self-assured patience, he always passed the other runners until, at the end, he sashayed across the finish line first, and always with an unflustered smile. When I’m whipping around the classroom in a frenzy to finish this or that lesson, I sometimes think of him and his serene and enduring way of doing great things on the track, and then I usually smile and settle myself down to do this taxing work of teaching with the kind of trustful patience it requires. Teaching teenagers can be like a race, yes, but one that’s best run in soft and graceful ways.

TAKING OFF THE WEIGHTS

TAKING OFF THE WEIGHTS

Every so often, as I prepare for a class, I remind myself to just simply take off the weights. It's strange to me that I so often willingly carry enormous weights around with me when I'm teaching, and it is a definite relief to set them down and see them shrivel away to nothingness. These are not physical weights, but the shapeless, evanescent weights we carry inside us, like remorse and worry and diffidence and fear. If I'm not feeling guilty about not giving my best teaching to the previous class, then I'm concerned about the lack of creativity in this upcoming lesson, or about my lack of ability to steer the lesson to success, or about the blunders I might make as I bumble along. True, there are many times when I take the first steps in an English lesson with a cocky kind confidence, but there are too many instances when I carry the burdensome weights of my own irresolute attitudes. This is why it's such a relief when I remember to lay all those inner weights right down -- to simply set them aside and raise up my thoughts in liberation and sovereignty, to just say I am me and this is the moment and I can make miracles with this class. When I do this before a class -- when I loosen and let go of all the needless burdens -- I sometimes feel as light as the sunlight in my classroom. On those days I teach as easily as a breeze blows along, and the happiness I feel seems to flow from somewhere far beyond my sight.

MY LUCKY LIFE

"For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Spiritual Laws"

After a disquieting day at school, when I feel, for sure, that I have "wrought and suffered" more than a person should, I sometimes consider again this sentence from Emerson, and almost always I start smiling at my breathtaking good fortune. Yes, I suffer through a fair share of disappointments in my days in the classroom, but Emerson thankfully reminds me that a wide world of smoothly-working marvels is always all around me, and that these marvels are a whole lot more like smiles than frowns. When I'm feeling sorry for myself, now and then, for teaching like an utter tenderfoot, the sunlight is sharing its miracles, new winds are renewing the world, and happiness is holding its countless doors wide open and waiting for me. When my teaching seems to be collapsing into pointlessness, the boundless power of life is letting loose its harmonious and beautiful forces, as usual. The life I'm so lucky to be part of is infinitely more immense than my small classroom and its paltry ups and downs. There are stars sweeping the sky that make my tiny troubles trail off in insignificance.

RIDING -- AND READING-- BACKWARDS

I sometimes enjoy riding backwards on the train, seeing the countryside recede in front of me as if I am traveling back past places I passed earlier on the outward bound trip. It reminds me often of the feeling I get when I take my students backwards through a book we just finished. It's as if, at the end, we step off the train of the book for a few days, but then hop back on for the backwards trip to enjoy the journey from a fresh perspective. As we bring ourselves back through the chapters, scenes or sentences we missed might suddenly seem especially significant, or characters who were quiet on the first reading might make their thoughts thoroughly heard on this backward trip through the book. As we retrace the trip, the book, perhaps, unfolds in a fresh manner, making a new experience for us. The book then becomes two books, or three books, depending on how many times we board its train and sit backwards as the story progresses back to its start.

TUNING IN

I got to thinking about the Internet the other day, the way it’s always there, just waiting for us to “tune in” to it, and it reminded me of the mighty power that passes the time in my English classes, patiently waiting for us to tune in to its soft but far-reaching influence. I guess I’m speaking of whatever it is that puts together our thoughts and feelings – whatever it is that makes thinking and feeling such profoundly revamping and replenishing activities. Where do they all come from, the ideas and sentiments that stream through the lives of my students and me as we work through a Shakespeare sonnet or a Jane Austen story? Where does this power have its home – the power that provides my classes with whatever useful lessons might be learned in 8th and 9th grade English? When I muse over these questions, I sometimes do think of the Internet, the way it connects us, with a simple click of a key, to an almost infinite source of ideas – a source that seems strangely similar to that which produces the powerful ideas and feelings that flow among us in my classes. It’s so easy – accessing the widespread wisdom of the Internet, or tuning in to the thoughts of all time and space in my small classroom. For the Web, we simply touch a keypad, and for inspirations in English class, we just swing open the doors of our minds and make room for the millions of thoughts forever waiting there.

REJOICING IN AFFLUENCE

I have always loved the fact that the word “affluence” derives from the description of flowing water, and this year, as usual, I see a lot of this affluence in my classroom. I’m not speaking of dollars and cents, but of ideas that don’t stop flowing from the start of class to the finish. They don’t always flow in the directions I might have planned for them, but they flow nonetheless – effortlessly and relentlessly. My classroom is an absolute sea of ever-flowing streams of thoughts, coming and going and getting started again and again. Occasionally, just to prove this to myself and the kids, I ask them to stop thinking for sixty seconds, and of course it’s an impossible request. Their lives, and mine, are non-stop rivers of ideas that no damn can bring to a standstill, and I rejoice in my good fortune that finds me in the midst of these rivers for six or seven hours each day.

POLISHED CASUALNESS

When a friend and I passed a restaurant yesterday that advertised “polished casualness” as its motif for fine dining, I immediately thought of the kind of writing I expect my students to do. We didn’t eat at the restaurant, but as we passed by, I pictured the pristine but stress-free atmosphere, just the kind of ambiance I hope to see in the students’ essays. I insist on order, precision, and correctness, but I also encourage a little looseness and liberty in their writing, a bit of the casualness that probably comes along with the polish in the restaurant we passed. There’s room in good writing for both tidiness and independence, both adherence to rules and affection for inventiveness. I’d like to see sentences in their essays that are graceful and at the same time somewhat undomesticated. I always hope their writing stands up with stateliness and last-word authority, but also dances with the most casual kind of confidence.

LUCKY WORDS

"So may some gentle muse
With lucky words favor my [teaching]."
-- John Milton, "Lycidas"

I love the idea of "lucky words", and I'm grateful to have been graciously given so many millions of them over the years of my teaching. Lucky means fortunate, but it also means magical and mysterious and felicitous and blessed. It means words that come to me like alerts from a wilderness when I'm teaching, words that work their way into my teaching the way water flows wherever it will. I don't wish my words into existence; they simply show up, one after another forever, flowing into my life and out to my students moment by moment. In a sense, they are all lucky words because they all bring me, in some way or other, the prosperity of this vast life that I, and all of us, are part of. Words work the best of all wonders, shining their lights so my students and I can see which ways to go in our studies. Every so often, I say a silent thanks to these promising signals, these always encouraging words that wander from somewhere into my teaching, time and time again.

RAISING THE SHADES

It’s an old story, the one about the man who made himself miserable by living in a house with all the shades pulled down, and it sometimes comes to mind when I’m teaching. It occurs to me, now and again, that my only significant task as a teacher is to help the students raise the shades in their own lives. It’s not so much that I should give them new knowledge, but that I should simply help them throw open their inner doors and windows so they see what’s always been there. Sure, I can offer them crumbs and scraps of information – novel ideas, feelings they may be unfamiliar with -- but somehow I sense that all they need to know sits hidden inside them, and the teacher’s important job is to cheer them on toward slowly but surely uncovering it all. When I teach about the themes in Of Mice and Men, I don’t think of myself as setting small truths down in their minds like so many gifts; rather, I feel like I’m making it more possible for them to think thoughts that have always been inside them, but that have never risen to the surface. I’m more of an assistant discoverer than a giver of gifts. The sun of wisdom is always shining inside the teenagers I teach, and I like, most of all, to make it easy for the shades to be lifted so they see that sun.

SPEEDERS AND DRIFTERS

In my fairly long drive to school each morning, I am joined on the roads by both speeders and drifters, the same kinds of travelers I see in my classroom each day – and there’s surely room for both. On the interstate and back roads, some drivers obviously like the graceful feelings that come with cruising along at lightning speeds, while others employ – and take pleasure in -- the slow pace of clouds coming and going down the roads of the sky. I used to get exasperated with both sets of drivers – the speeders for recklessly governing the roads with their speed, the drifters for doing everything possible to prevent me from getting where I’m going – but now I see a proper place for both. As long as they are law-abiding, both groups of drivers deserve their place on the highways, and the same is true of the speeders and drifters in English class. Some of my students can cruise through assignments effortlessly, like the guys in the get-up-and-go cars that race past me, but other kids carry their thoughts like heavy weights and work longer minutes and hours than the speeders – but both can bring a lot of light to my classes. In my teaching, there’s a necessary place for all kinds of students – the sharp and the stumbling, the fast and the unsure – just as there’s the right place on the roads for those who rush and those who roll slowly along.

LITTLE MIRACLES

I stooped to pick up a scrap of paper this morning – a small act in a nondescript day – and it caused me to pause and wonder why I don’t truly notice more of the millions of small acts I carry out each day. The fact is that I’m doing something at every waking moment, whether walking down the hall to class, carrying a cart of trash to the road, or simply sitting down at my desk for some work – and the sad fact is that I rarely pay attention to any of these tasks. They turn my life in new directions each moment, but my mind is usually too immersed in musings and wonderings to notice them. What’s really unlucky is that these little nameless acts – all of them – have forces inside them that might remodel my life in small ways, if only I showed some honest interest in them. They are little miracles that might make me see the wonder that works its magic each moment. Picking up a scrap of paper, while apparently insignificant, requires the nimble movement of many muscles and bones, and the sunlight shining on the paper when I picked it up was flawless in its glows and colors. It was a tiny task done in a moment, but a miracle nonetheless -- one of countless marvels I bring about each day with hardly a notice. Typing on a keyboard, glancing up on a gray day, doing the dishes in a silver sink – all are wonders I wish I could appreciate and praise more often.