my life to live

Notes about writers:

• To be a writer means you talk about your novel, your story, as if it were something which always already existed somewhere in the universe, as if you were an archaeologist unearthing an artifact from another world, carefully dusting off the earth away from its ancient surface.  Its characters are already real people.  You did not create them.  
• To be a writer means to always be alive.  You are simply a conduit for everything going on around you.  The events of the day, the strangers you encounter in your daily travels—these filter through you and emerge on the other side refined into what another might call art.  

I

On nights like this, the city wears on you and you wear your city.  You wear it like a wool pullover, rain-damp on the outside and sweat-damp on the inside and tugging all over because it no longer quite fits.  The dumpsters baking in the sun and wafting their scent as you pass went from unnoticeable to offensive, and offensive to intolerable.  Your apartment transformed from an aerie to a garret.  Your commute to work gets longer and more arduous every day.  

All the buildings; they look the same.

All the faces; they look the same. 

All the days, months years; they are the same.  

All the corners of the earth pull at you tonight, tugging gently at your sleeves and your cuffs.  Tonight, you want the shawl of another city’s evening fog laying gently about your shoulders.  Tonight, you want the silent lights and weighty monuments of another glittering city spread out like jewelry at your fingertips.  Tonight, you want to stand in the shadow of skyscrapers and have the clean chill of a lakeshore for shoes.  

What if…

• for every product you used or consumed, you could somehow know its entire bloody history?  Really know it, not just by dint of trusting the print on the box or the information you Google.  The maquiladoras which produced your clothing, the factory farm which produced your meal, the animals blinded to perfect your shampoo, the campaign money donated by your neighborhood big box store.  I want to live with integrity, but I drift through life blissfully unaware of what everyday items might be tainted.  Perhaps we need another Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but print is dead.
• American education is an industry whose intellectually contaminated and socially irresponsible practices must be called out into the public.  Perhaps we need another The Jungle, but print is dead.
• we are living in another Dark Ages?  Once there was nothing ignorant about being unable to read, or by solving problems by “an eye for an eye.”  In our time, such a person is pitied or scorned by the cultural elite.  How will ethics evolve in the new millennium?  For what will our ancestors pity or scorn us?

When is it wiser to show vulnerability?  At what point do you think setting boundaries for others becomes building walls for ourselves?

Sometimes, in dealing with a stubborn student, I used to find it more effective to model being apologetic myself than calling them out on their inappropriate behavior.  Shaheed, I’m really sorry that I had to give you a consequence in front of the whole class like that.  That’s pretty embarrassing, and I can see why it would make you angry.  But can you see why I needed to give you a demerit?  

It’s a risky move, and certainly one I rarely tried.  After all, there was always the chance that the child might be the type to view this type of discipline as being “soft.”  Maybe somewhere down the line, that child might remember the exchange and view it as permission to repeat his or her behavior, or at least see what else he or she could get away with.  But if the goal was to get the child to admit his or her own poor choices, well, it was often a highly effective approach.  

Because the longer I work in schools, the more I learn about the way we work.  Anything we do, we were taught at one point, either through explicit lesson or through subconscious observation.  And apology does not come to us innately, the way mothering comes instinctually to many mammals.  Rather, it’s a skill to be honed and an art to be perfected.  

I have great respect for people who can apologize.  I don’t mean the trivial, compulsive apologizing that some silly, insecure girls do all day long because they’ve been socialized to do so.  Sorry to bother you!  Omigod, sorry for asking, but…  Sorry, but I didn’t hear that the first time.  Sorry, but can I borrow a pen?  These are not true apologies; these are the needy bleats of someone desperate for approval.  The best apologies are made out of the desire to make someone else feel better, and not yourself, as true apologies are selfless in their conception.  It’s one person momentarily putting aside his or her own urge for self-preservation out of deference for another.  

The best apologists are unafraid to lay themselves at the feet of another for the sake of their heart.  You should seek them out, because they make the best friends and most cherished of partners.  Because saying you are sorry means having the empathy to understand someone else’s hurt feelings and the backbone to paint yourself—sometimes even falsely—as the villain, if that’s what it takes.  It means trusting someone else enough to know they will not take advantage of you.  And that’s not a weakness; that is a strength.  

I swear I’m not going to become a yoga blogger or anything like that.  I only own one item of clothing from Lululemon, and I have yet to memorize any of the chants, so I just mouth them the way I mouthed the Nicene Creed in church for years.  

But I’ve been going more and more.  I like the constant striving for perfection (although my super-yogi friend Ashley tells me that’s actually not what yoga is about at all, which just further proves my earlier point about becoming a yoga blogger), so that appeals to the overachiever side of me; the teacher in me appreciates how easily all the poses can be differentiated for varying skill levels.  

The last time I went, we worked on handstands, which I have yet to master.  This is a bit frustrating for me, because of the aforementioned overachieving side, but also because it was something that was extremely simple to pull off when I was a kid.  I wasn’t the only one experiencing difficulties, and the teacher stopped the class.  

She explained how when you’re upside-down, your body goes into “fight or flight” mode, and your lower back locks up and your legs begin to flail.  Once you can accept the strangeness of being upside-down, you can maintain the same posture that you would have normally, and that’s part of the secret of kicking up successfully.  

And isn’t that just like everything else?  I’ve had some disruptions to my routine lately, and it’s turned me into someone I don’t care for.  I waver between dropping everything entirely and running away from the problem entirely, or going into bitch mode for reinforcement and defense.  When I play both possible scenarios out in my head, neither makes me happy.  Choosing either “fight” or “flight” is still cowardly, because both options preclude one from taking the risk to be emotionally vulnerable, to be in that strange, upside-down place that really is not that different from being right side up.

So the final reason why I like yoga isn’t necessarily so much about yoga teaching me anything brand-new about my life as it is a reminder of what I already know.  And that is what I’ve come away with this week: everything you need to do in your life, you already know how to do.  Any challenge which may face you down somewhere along the road, you are already equipped to overcome.  

We went to yoga in Ardmore this morning; the class was filled with Main Line matrons.  In the post-class scramble for boots and shoes and coats, we found ourselves in conversation with one.  She revealed that she had herself formerly worked in education, as an administrator for turnaround schools in Philadelphia.  She ultimately left after realizing that the problems in the public schools were far too deeply rooted in the system for her role to be effective.  ”I have a great respect for teachers and the people who stay in the profession,” she said as she laced up her boots.  ”Some people just get burnt out.  The demands on teachers are just so different these days, and people have so many opinions on what kids need to be learning.”  

We mentioned it was controversial.  

“Oh, it’s very controversial,” she said, lacing up the other boot.  ”You know, I think kids need to be educated on systems, and how they work, and how to look at a system analytically and break it down, and then build it back up again.  That’s everything about how our world works.  And ethics.  Kids need to learn ethics—not religion, per se, but ethics.  How to make a decision.  How to decide what is the right decision in a given circumstance.”  She stood up, and added, “I think about 75% of our adults could benefit from a crash course in ethics, if you ask me.  I think our world would be significantly different.”  

There was more conversation, of course—of the school culture in Lower Merion’s public schools, and how it compared to other schools in the Main Line, and which brands made the best winter boots, and so on.  But it’s really only that line which got me thinking about how there are wonderful people everywhere you go, and what a life you would lead if you made an effort to seek them out every day.  

You don’t have to be happy all the time.

Paradoxically, those who aim to be in a constant state of striving, who are always beginning their sentences with “I want to…” and “I need to…” and “I should…”—it is those people who will be happiest when the game is over and the race has ended.  

Aim for contentment and complacency, and you’ll always have regrets.