"You're the worst sick person I've ever met. You have to let yourself be weak."
That was my wife's advice. And she was right. I am awful at resting, and when I'm sick the same thing is true. I just want to accomplish something, to learn something, to be productive...but resting? For five, six, seven days? There's nothing patient or sedentary about me, so being those things and letting the world spin on in my absence is so counter to the ways I'm made.
But I did it. I stopped. I listened to myself. I was patient. I let myself heal. I also had the chance to catch up on the novel my students are reading, Purple Hibiscus. In the novel, silence plays an important role and the inner minds of the characters play a prominent, albeit mysterious, role. As I read about silence as a character, I also invited silence into my own week...instead of becoming annoyed by silence, scared of silence, and avoiding it at all costs.
I found silence.
During my time away, my students were viewing the feature film, Invictus. The movie tells the story of Nelson Mandela's relationship with the South African Springbok national rugby team in 1995.
When I returned to school, my students were almost done with the film. They expressed amazement at Mandela's strength of spirit, spending 27 years in prison on Robben Island prior to being elected president. Then, instead of harboring resentment, the man united the nation, pulling his captors into the deep embrace of humanity.
But 27 years?
Talk about silence.
The title of the film draws its name from the Victorian poem by William Ernest Henley. In the last stanza, Henley writes,
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
No matter how ugly things get, there is something beneath--something inside of us--that can rise up. My students saw this as they watched the film; they realized that there is something in our souls that is divorced from external events. There is something within that is deeper and stronger than our circumstances.
When I remarked that, "You can't choose the story you're in, but you CAN choose which character you are in the story!" one student jumped out of her seat, "OMG, that's so good--I'm writing it down!"
I had to laugh to myself. It might have been good, but at the end of the day, it was wisdom. Nobody responds, "OMG, that's so good--I'm writing it down!" when they hear a good fact or when they're downloading information during a lecture. Kids want to grow, they want to change.
The trailer for the incredible film, Innsaei : the power of intuition includes the following sentence: "Wisdom has been replaced by knowledge, and knowledge has been replaced by information."
My student had just internalized a morsel of wisdom, but it hit her as a Eureka moment. She knew she needed it, but she is so hardwired by society to consume information instead of to sit and patiently wait for the world to deliver a piece of wisdom.
Back to that word, "innsaei," though. It's an Icelandic word that means intuition. But in Iceland, it has many meanings. It can mean, "the sea within," which refers to the borderless nature of our inner world, a constantly moving world of vision, feelings, and imagination beyond words.
Isn't that awesome?
And we can't get there--to that sea within--without silence, without finding peace, without unplugging, without slowing down. Sometimes we need stillness to reflect.
So I began by writing that sometimes we are granted a window into why something hard and painful happens. I don't know if Nelson Mandela realized why he spent 27 years on Robben Island, but I imagine he wouldn't have been the leader he was without it. South Africa needed him to experience that to understand his role as leader of a family of 43 million.
I know that being sick forced me to be weak, and to slow down, and to stop running, and to reflect.
But it also allowed my students to have a substitute teacher. And to watch a movie. And to have the tides of their inner seas churned a little bit. And that substitute teacher? She's amazing. And I think I had to be gone so she could be there, and so they could be there with her. Because when the movie ended, she walked to the front of the classroom, and with tears in her eyes, she addressed the class.
"I want to tell you that I am from Venezuela. And this movie made me realize what my country needs. We need a leader like that...we need somebody to unite us..."
She went on, but what she said is lost to me because I wasn't there. But my students were.
They were watching her tears, listening to her voice, basking in the silence of her Innsaei.
Innsaei
No comments:
Post a Comment