Everybody is Somebody

There's a CD that's been floating around my family's minivan since June. It's kind of miraculous it hasn't been scratched beyond playability given the number of adventures we took between June and August. One particular song on the album, though, has caught my children's fancy--especially my almost four year old son. The song is by the wonderful Taj Mahal, and the introduction to his chorus goes like this:

Everybody is somebody.
Nobody is nobody.


"Dad," my son asked me the other afternoon.
"What does that even mean?"

I tried to explain the notion of identity, inclusivity, pluralism, to his little self, a mere 45 months of living under his belt, as he built a skyscraper out of blocks.

Afterwards he blinked, smiled at me, and said,

"Of course everybody matters...because they're people." Then he was off, scampering away to attend to another project of the utmost importance.

And I was left--as I often am--to bask in the wake of his brilliance.

----------------------------------------------------------------

When I was in high school I had a friend who didn't like rice. He used to joke that "the only thing rice is good for is satisfying one's craving to eat a thousand of something." I don't know how many grains of rice are in a serving, but I do know that a thousand is a big number. And I know that (thanks to Enrico Fermi) if I started counting now, it would take me almost two weeks to count to a million.

A billion, though? Gosh, that would take even longer...but by how much? 

There are roughly 7,500,000,000 people on the planet right now. And, as far as my son and his pal Taj Mahal are concerned, everybody is somebody. I was reminded of this over the course of the summer. I was reminded how human we are...how much people matter. There are 7.5 billion of us, yet each of us matters so much. Remove a blade of grass, a grain of rice, a CD from my minivan, and each is replaceable. But people? We are irreplaceable. Surely some people are remembered longer than others, and you and I will likely not ever be famous. In fact, Emily Esfahani Smith wrote about how we're all destined for ordinary (and why that's okay...and important) in a recent New York Times article. But to the people in our spheres of influence, we matter so much.

But even the humans who are famous are undeniably human, vulnerable, and humbled by the swells of emotion that come with being human. NBA star Isaiah Thomas reminded us of this when he wrote a letter describing how sad being traded made him...how he had two young sons who were so excited to start school in Boston, but now they were moving to Cleveland.

David Torrence died this summer. I was heartbroken. He drowned in a pool. That David was an Olympian distance runner (and American record-holder in the 1000m indoors) matters less than how David lived as a human being. The outpouring of love from those who knew him was staggering, though not surprising. David was amazing. He lived for amazing. He raced hard. He raced fast. He loved people. He lit up rooms. What David did as an athlete was such a minor blip on the register of human impact. What he did off the 400m oval on which he went to work, though...JP Slater said it best, "He was a competitor. But he was also a giver."

We all have the potential to do this, don't we? To give a part of ourselves to something bigger. To stretch beyond our survival and self-interest. To go beyond winning (whatever that means).

All of these ideas swirled in my head as I embarked on the beginning of my school year. It's my tenth year at my school. My twelfth year as a teacher. A decade working with 8th graders. I have the pleasure of getting to know my students in the classroom as thinkers and listeners and learners. But I also have the opportunity to know them as people. As somebodies. These moments happen on the loops we run at cross country practice, during advisory, recess, study hall, and during the field trips we take. Often, the most meaningful moments of learning don't actually take place in the classroom; instead, they take place in the in-between times, the brief encounters when we actually learn something about each other...me and my students, my students and me. As my 4 year-old knows, they're people after all. Somebodies, sure. Irreplaceable, all of them.

(gosh, 30 minutes flies by. PUBLISH.)