Testing and investing

Sometimes, the clouds are the scenery. (Camden, Maine, September 2021)

I'm trying so hard to keep up, which is probably why things keep going wrong.

I worked all day on Sunday, but I didn't think to send a certain email that I really should have sent.

I got rear-ended on my way to work on Monday. This technically wasn't my fault, but I know better than to be on the road during the busiest time of the morning. I left at 7:30 when I should really be up and out by six. I had too many things to do.

And then on Wednesday afternoon, I wasted almost two hours at the mall trying to find jeans. I figured that in a shopping mecca like Atlanta, it wouldn't be hard to find something appropriate, but I walked away with nothing.

And as I was thinking to myself, "I'm too busy to waste so much time," I remembered something I said to one of my students last week after she spent an hour trying to understand squares of binomials and felt she had made no progress. I told her that she hadn't wasted the hour — she had invested it. It was all part of the process. She was an hour closer to grasping the concept.

Am I an hour closer to finding jeans that fit? Maybe. But there's another story here, one that transcends shopping, traffic, and work. It's the story of a way of measuring my life that is fundamentally no longer working.

The growth that is happening — and needs to happen — is not in my ability to be more productive or fit more work into the day.

It's in my ability to be more forgiving, more accepting, and more generous. Not only of others, but of myself.

On a daily basis, I am being asked to develop humility. I'm being challenged to accept that I am not on control of everything and I don't have all the answers.

I'm not sure exactly what I expected when I left my cozy house in Maine to teach school again, but it wasn't this. That's the fun of it, I guess. I’m being tested and stretched in new ways — not always in fresh and interesting ways, but they’re definitely not boring, stay-at-home-during-Covid ways.

I thought that I might be able to say yes to more things — to start some new projects and have some new adventures. I can see that, to give my best to the projects I've already got going, I will have to put some other things on hold.

"Do I understand this correctly?" my entrepreneur friends say. "You're spending five months investing in a business that you're closing?"

It doesn't make sense on paper, but that's not what I'm doing, anyway. What I'm doing is investing in nineteen kids and their families, trying to keep them safe and learn what they have to teach me. It is an even harder job than I thought it was three years ago. How could I have ever thought that I had mastered it?

I know I'm not getting worse — I'm getting better. But I'm seeing more of the hill there is to climb. I'm doing it, little by little.

So I'm not wasting time. I'm spending it just as I wish, doing things that challenge and confound me, trying to be more of the person I want to be. I will get it wrong, and then I will learn — just like my students. There's nothing more worthwhile I could be doing.