the things we share

Two young people are standing at the front of my classroom. Sometimes they are identified as "my students," but that term cannot define them.

They are guiding the group of other young people in an exercise about the importance of words. Sometimes they call each other classmates, but that moniker won't last forever and most of them will drift apart and grow into adulthood on their own.

Today, though, they share a space and their ideas are interconnected.

The two students are leading a seminar in which they facilitate discussion around Isabel Allende's short story, "Two Words." The story is enveloped in magical realism and details the life of the mystical Belisa Crepusculario, a woman who "made her living selling words." She gives two words to "the Colonel," a political candidate and hardened man of war for whom Belisa has just written a speech. She describes him as "the loneliest man in the world." Intoxicated and overwhelmed by these two words, the Colonel's life is transformed and his existence takes on an entirely new trajectory.

They ask us to "write down 3 times that words...have had an impact on your life."

They come so easily to me. I jot down four.

A police report about a car accident in which I was the driver.

Two letters from teachers, each scrawled in the pages of a book.

A professor's rhetorical question, "You're not planning on majoring in English, right?"

Each of them has guided my life and sent me on a trajectory...but there have been so many more. I could list the words spoken to me by coaches, friends, parents, colleagues, my own children, that have pushed me forward, backward, or sideways.

These words matter so much, so when I think about my students and the ways they're growing up, and out, and onward, I'm overwhelmed by what I say (or don't) to them. 

So I'm writing them a letter. I'm taking a risk and putting words to what can't be said because in an age of distraction--an age where knowing who someone is requisite to understanding how someone is--we are attaching meaning to the things that don't matter...to interests and allegiances and preferences and hobbies. We don't actually know each other, we just know about each other. We dwell on the surface and we're lonely in the midst of the barrage of social media and a veneer of over-scheduled interactions. 

My letter is going to be a book. And it is a book of gratitude. And it is going to be incomplete. A draft. And I will solicit their feedback. And it will become a living document that they will play a role in refining for my students next year. I want it to enable them to have a conversation with me that will never end.

I have taught them so many things that they won't remember...and this letter will be both their final exam review as well as a reminder of all the things that DO matter...the things I want them to carry beyond my classroom walls.

I want them to remember a handful of words that they won't throw out when the exam is over. So I'm writing them a letter that is also a book. And, just like my two teachers who gifted me with words scrawled into the pages of books so many years ago, I will write them notes.

Those two young people are now guiding the conversation about how much words matter.

Maya Angelou was right..."people will forget what you said and what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel."

I aim to tell my students how they made me think. I can't drive away the melancholy with two words like Belisa Crepusculario, but I can tell them how they made me feel. I can tell them the things I shared, the things they shared...the things we shared that have changed my life.