Closer to Fine

During this first week in October I have the pleasure of sitting down with the parents of my students to discuss the year thus far. We get to talk about each child as a student, a citizen, and a human being. It's a lovely time and, regardless of how a student is doing, the focus always remains centered upon who the student is. Right now. Today.

We don't know who the students will become. How could we? One day they will wake up, look in the mirror, and realize that they've grown up. Another day they'll wake to find they've grown old. The process of aging and becoming wise, though, isn't binary, it's gradual.

My students are beginning to read Lord of the Flies this week in English class. In world cultures, those same students are learning about Zoroaster, the 7th Century (BCE) Persian mystic who first proclaimed that the world was a battleground between forces of good and evil. The conversations we've had remain centered around the reality that there are few truths in the world.

It reminds me of the Indigo Girls' song, "Closer to Fine." The lyrics begin,

I'm tryin' to tell you somethin' 'bout my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you've ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It's only life after all, yeah

Well darkness has a hunger that's insatiable
And lightness has a call that's hard to hear
I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety 'til I sank it
I'm crawling on your shores

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There's more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine
The closer I am to fine

As the chorus suggests, the lines we follow do tend to be crooked. But they ultimately arrive us someplace new. The sense of arrival, however, is fleeting because--like most things, life is not binary. Humans are so quick to place boundaries and boxes around us as groups, but we fail ourselves when we do that.

My friend Ben recently shared a way of thinking about this topic when he described two different ways of thinking about Christianity. One way is the conventional means of viewing followers of Jesus as either being "in" or "out." Again, it's a binary method of identifying people and is known as a "bounded set." The other approach, however, is known as a "centered set" and refers to the direction of a person's movement.

But this needn't only apply to Christians.

Our thinking of other humans can be either bounded or centered.

For the boys of Lord of the Flies, they are too bounded. If they centered around being saved, and coexisting, they could succeed. But the "us" versus "them" narrative takes over.

The Indigo Girls would assuredly believe that every step on the "crooked line" either moves them closer to fine, or farther from fine. When I talk with my students...when I talk with their parents...what I ultimately want is to help them draw closer to fine. To grow closer to believing that they matter, that they are enough. They are so deep, so rich in their understanding and their curiosity.  Who they are is not binary. I don't have good students and bad students; weak students and strong students. Social scientists and scholars no longer refer to nations as undeveloped or developed. Instead, we now refer to countries as either developing or developed, but the reality is that all countries are in the process of developing into something. We, too, are not bounded sets in life. We are centered sets who are moving somewhere.

We are moving, always.

I love teaching my moving, evolving, growing students (no matter how centered, or uncentered they are). They help me draw closer to fine.