The Art of Going There

7/14/2008

"The most romantic of all things is the walk to the mailbox in hope of a letter."

Those were the words that got me. There stood the woman I had only just met--my future bride--speaking words rich with eloquence and glowing with truth. All those in attendance at the writing conference were audibly moved as a hush fell over the hall. While she'd answered a question about why we write, she'd done so much more: she'd revealed to us a granule of that which makes us human. The desire for connection, for a wholeness we cannot accomplish by ourselves. 

Of course I'd be lying if I suggested that, at that very moment, I knew...but the honest answer is that I was too overwhelmed by the power of words to even know what I was feeling. When she and I departed four days--days spent writing, confronting, exploring, and savoring one other's words--later, we exchanged addresses and began an old-fashioned chain of correspondence. Writing hand-written letters to one another.

4/4/1984

Truth be told, my love affair with letter-writing, though, began much earlier. My parents used to refer to mail as either "anybody mail" or "whobody mail." We lived in a tiny schoolhouse in northern New Hampshire and the postal workers' lonely sojourn by our house on Lost Nation Road represented one of the highlights of each day. The 90 degree turn on which our mailbox made its home was often overshot by a late night driver and my father got in the practice of repairing the rusty old mailbox's scrap wood post every couple of months. My mother would eventually paint the words "Good News In Here" on the front.

We loved mail. I loved letters.

4/22/2001

At 17, the testosterone-laden mosaic of my adolescent ethos centered on my passions for sports and writing. So it was no surprise that Sports Illustrated found its way into my lap each week at the local library. I loved the work of Rick Reilly and wrote him a letter.

To my shock, Rick wrote back.

Nothing compared to receiving this letter as an aspiring writer.

10/19/2016

When I shared this letter, these stories, with my students yesterday, I was revealing a part of myself...I was sharing with them more than a letter, or a passion. I was telling them that I trusted them. I was pushing past the awkwardness of emotions and going there.

I'd gotten the idea to focus on letter-writing for 10 minutes a day in English class because I read the four thank-you notes to Michelle Obama published in the New York Times earlier this week. I was moved by the unconventional nature of their wisdom, their gratitude, their beauty. Each reflection (because that's really what they were) brought such enigmatically beautiful poetry to our First Lady's existence. My students and I then embarked together on a detailed scouring of the website Letters of Note, looking for letters, for wisdom, for emotions, for words and phrases, that inspired us.

My students recognized that when people are writing to those they love and admire, they become better writers, their vocabularies swell, they avoid the commonplace cliches and ordinary verbiage of their colloquial vernacular, and seek to put words to what can't be said.

And so it was that we began considering the people to whom we might compose a note of gratitude.

Here are some excerpts.

"...I want to tell you about the first time I went fishing..."

"You probably don't remember the advice you gave me one Thanksgiving, but I do. They're words I'll never forget."

"I don't know how to say thank you."

"There is something about your smile."

"Thank you. Thank you. THANK YOOOOOU."

"I love doing nothing with you."

"We learned a lot more than we realized in second grade, didn't we?"

"There is nobody in the world like you."

“A week later, you died. Cancer stole you away”

“You taught me how to be brave, how to be happy, and how to let go.”

“Hearing stories about your childhood, and everything you’ve been through, made me realize how lucky I am.”

“I’ve always been nervous about doing things.”

“Your smile and laughter is something that people everywhere will never forget.”

“That’s when I found out exactly what you were: an inspiration.”

“The moment I heard the first song, I immediately realized my passion for music.”

“You increased my love for it so much.”

“It’s more than fair to say that this trip really opened up my eyes.”

“When I think about how you risk your life every day, for people you don’t even know, I know you are a real hero.”

“You are a genius!”

“You were a frequent visitor, even though I didn’t see you much.”

“I didn’t notice how much I would miss you until now.”

“Even though we only spent 55 minutes together each day, we always shared a connection.”

“There are so many things that I take for granted that you do.”

“The only way that you can achieve your goal is through hard work, just like anything else.”

“I’d never sought their wisdom or wanted to know what they thought...they’d never given me a reason to.”

“When you first came to my door many years ago, I slammed it in your face and ran away.”







Watching my students shed the bravado of adolescence and embrace an attitude of appreciation was pretty remarkable.

"When you leave the classroom," I added. "Try to look for other moments of admiration in your day. Who do you notice? To whom could you write your next thank-you note?"

I said these words, but I didn't have to. The tone had been set, and it was contagious.

I think I owe them a thank-you note for their tenderness, their courage, and for pushing past the awkwardness of emotions and going there.

the it-ness of each of us

Here's the way this usually works:

I think all week about my own growth, my reflections, my beliefs, my students, my children, my life. 

My life.

I remember being little and looking in the mirror and looking into my own eyes until I looked like a stranger; I recall saying my name aloud until it sounded foreign, weird, inaudibly bizarre as the syllable (for there was only one in my case) fled from my lips, disappearing moments later into the ether of silence. I wondered if what I saw as purple matched the version that other's had, and questioned whether apples tasted the same to everybody, and--if not--how would we ever know? 

And then I would consider my life. I would question myself, my existence, and the indistinguishable it-ness (the essence of just being it) of what it meant to be me.

My life.

So somewhere in the midst of my week (in all its itness, because, like, what else could it possibly be?) I find something to blog about. But this week was different. So many things stimulated and inspired me. Flooded, inundated by ideas and visions and possibility, yesterday came and went without me knowing what to write. Truth be told, yesterday was also one of the busiest spans of 24 hours I've experienced, but nevertheless I spent the day feeling as though the vessel holding that gorgeously impossible broth of ideas in which my brain floats was brimming with a meniscus that was sure to overflow.

But it didn't, and here I am. At a desk. Writing. And because I can't write everything, I'll have to just embrace the spirit of this blog and write something and spend 30 minutes doing it.

It doesn't usually work this way, but today I just need to answer a question, posed to me via Twitter during my time in Austin, Texas at the AMLE (Association of Middle Level Education) conference:

 While I was a student in the course, and assuredly not the teacher, here is my memory of 6-8 grade Latin.

Above the huge marble fireplace in my middle school Latin classroom there was an oversized chart made of graph paper. Each student's name was written along the left side of the chart. Every time a student finished a chapter in our Latin textbook we would fill in a box on the grid. Now, normally, students would progress through the textbook en masse, with teachers delivering lessons and students achieving various degrees of mastery along the way. Karen, my Latin teacher, however, was different. She felt that one-on-one Latin instruction was preferable and that each student should teach themselves the text, leaning on her for support when it was needed. Everything had to be completed, and corrected if necessary, until it earned a grade of 100%. Once a student earned 100%, they could move on.

If a student finished four chapters in a marking period, they earned an A.

Three chapters earned a B.

Two chapters resulted in a mark of C.

And one chapter earned a D.

Oh, and if you had a perfect score on your end of chapter translation you earned a cake. Like a real cake. Like a whole, big Pepperidge Farm personal cake. To eat. During Latin class.

One quick look at the chart, though, in--say--the spring of 1997 would have quickly alerted a classroom visitor to two clear realities: 

1. Will McDonough had four colored boxes filled in next to his name.

2. Two girls in the class were closing in on chapter 30 and would be starting the Latin II textbook by the end of the year.

Yes, that's right. I earned a B during my first trimester of 6th grade and a D during my second trimester.

Now here's the thing: I was a bright kid. I was earning mostly Bs and As in all my other classes. But I didn't care about getting 100% on anything. I would often finish the chapter, but never correct anything to 100%. I was so excited to see what the fortis legatus was going to be doing in the next translation.

Furthermore, we were tessellating the walls with original tessellations in math class; we were building hot air balloons out of Ty-Vek in Science class; we were memorizing lines for Bye Bye Birdie; we were memorizing Emily Dickinson and reading Hamlet in English; and we had just returned from a trip to Quebec City where we'd practiced our French; I'd just mastered a between the legs dribble on the basketball court!

School was so fascinating. So inspiring. So Alive!

And then there was Latin class. Latin class where a perfect translation could earn me a cake? 

Where the entirety of class was spent reading a textbook? 

Alone?!?! 

I was a raging extrovert. I loved my friends. I was curious beyond measure. 

For anyone who was self-motivated and felt deep wells of satisfaction at constructing the perfect translation, this was great. I'm sure those two girls loved their cakes and their perfect notes and their achievement. But those carrots didn't work for me.

So, with two minutes left in this blog, why was I so quick to praise this practice on Twitter if I didn't like it?

Well, I think self-pacing is great when it works. I think students should be able to progress at their own pace, and to master material. What I don't like, though, is the public nature of the graph; the awarding of baked goods; and the one-dimensional teaching model. If a curriculum can be self-paced and dynamic, I'm all for it. But I am a firm believer that middle school needs to be an experience. That it can't just be a student and a textbook and the pursuit of perfection. As Chip Wood remarked, middle school should be a little like summer camp and a little like the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Great Depression: active, project-oriented, and always with a unifying goal of the entire group.

We've got to meet students where they are as both thinkers and learners: as thinkers, they are students who are developing toward adolescence, but as learners they are each unique by that very same ubiquitous it-ness that makes their lives their own.

Movement

My daughter and I share many similarities. We are both the oldest children in our families; we both love adventure; we're both extroverts who thrive off of human connections; we both love morning and autumn and the hopeful anticipation of a letter in the mailbox.

We also both have an insatiable curiosity, a thirst for learning. And along with that desire for new discourse and information comes a penchant for learning something and immediately applying it to our lives. Like, right-at-that-very-second that our synapses fire like pistons and the cerebral cortex starts to chuff up the great mountain of fascination and opportunity, we are ready to teach our new insight to anyone within earshot.

We were born for soapboxes, yes, and I know it can cause some nightmarish tremors with the introverts in our family that feel like some sort of dystopian, endlessly-energized TED talk; yet this gift (or curse) also means that we don't have to plan as much as other people. We can improvise and wing it without a detailed course laid out before us.

Oh, and my daughter is five.*

In any case, I had one of these lightning quick learning experiences last week when I read skimmed something that caught my attention.

The excerpt that caught my interest was by Dr. Larry Crabb, and my understanding of it went like this:

Any interaction you have of more than a few seconds either moves you in a direction that is toward GOODNESS, or away from it.

Now, most certainly, in the 21st Century any notion of goodness as defined by a universal morality has become shockingly ambiguous. One need not look any further than one of America's recent presidential debates to understand that we are dwelling in a world of opaque subjectivity on the matter.

Still, this notion of movement caused me to think deeply about the words our Head of Upper School posed to our community at the beginning of the school year. He encouraged us to ask ourselves, 

"What would my best self do?"

Well, we all have varied views of each other's best selves, but it's likely, at our core, that we know ourselves. We know what it feels like to wake up each morning and simply FEEL GOOD about ourselves.

This morning, in fact, my daughter--that one who loves teaching stuff immediately after learning it--dragged me from bed and into the kitchen: "Dad, look the sun isn't even up yet, but the sky is getting pink...this is the perfect time of day to do the cumbia."

"The what?" I ask, half asleep and putting on a pot of coffee?

"This dance I learned in music class! It is from Latin America. Here, let me show you!"

And there was my daughter in all her glory, teaching me something. Her brain was awake, her heart was awake, and...most importantly, she felt so good about herself.

And this is the heart of it. Our best selves know what it feels like to be humming on all cylinders. We know when we're making good decisions, feeling proud, feeling connected; we know when we're being challenged and being brave, taking risks and surpassing new milestones.

Our brains all wake up in different ways, but having a grasp on ourselves and what wakes us up is important. I loved starting my day with my daughter, being guided toward a deepened understanding of her, and of myself. Her love of dancing in the predawn light of our kitchen was contagious, and in that interaction--one that lasted no more than two minutes--she moved me in the direction of real, tangible goodness.

I know because it made my heart glad. Glad to know her. Glad to be alive. Glad to have today with the movement of the cumbia in my every step and action, and the movement of GOOD in the rhythm of my heart.

*In her words, last week she tipped the scales from being "five and three-quarters" to being "basically six."

Dear Student,

Sometimes words fail, and you just need a poem to put words to what can't be said.

With gratitude to these two students, and all of the others, from whom I learned so much this week.



Dear Student,

There you are
to my left,
and you are crying.

Fat, round tears slipping down your cheek
from beneath your glasses
and you can't hide it
and you won't hide it.

And you shouldn't.
You are brave.

And we hear you now
in your hurting.

"I'm sorry,"
you whimper.
"I've never cried
about a book before."

And we are all crying,
but none of us have tears
like yours.

Your neighbor rubs your shoulder.
Everyone is with you,
together in your tears.



Dear Student,

You and I had never met,
and yet
there we sat,
in your kitchen,

that deadly blinking cursor
on a white screen
beckoning you to write what was on your heart.

"A college essay?" you ask.
And this is how they'll judge me?"

"Just make them feel something."
It doesn't have to be everything.
Just a glimpse. Don't tell them who you are...
show them."

And you do.

You take a tomb full of broken ideas
and biographical pain
and gnarled genealogy
and you make magic of the cracked mirrors.

Hours later, your mother tells me
that you knelt,
empowered by the truth of those mirrors,
alongside a teammate
before a game,
shuddering under the weight
of a world of eyes,
a cracked mirror in a sea of lies.

And in that kneeling,
you are winning:
winning a game
where no one loses.

Unknown Unknowns (what I told my students today)

I started class today with this clip. 

There was nothing political about the topic. Nor was the lesson today about weapons of mass destruction, or Baghdad, or the Middle East, or diplomacy.

And it wasn't about Donald Rumsfeld.

It was about the most foundational component of my 8th grade world cultures course...it was about recognizing that our own experiences are an aberration from the norms of human experience.

This classroom needs to have a culture of its own. It's already starting to take shape, but it needs each of us to have a sense of heightened awareness...heightened sensitivity.

There are things we know. 

We know lots of things.

And there are things we think we know.

We think we know lots of things.

And there are things we know we don't know.

And there are things we don't even know we don't know.

We are naive, oblivious, and completely in-the-dark about most things in the world.

And I include myself in that statement.

And all of those things matter. 

You see, my hope for this class is that you will grow to trust that each of us comes into this classroom with the best of intentions. That we are here to learn, here to share, and here to listen. Nobody wants to offend, alienate, or provoke. Nobody wants to make anybody else hurt.

I believe this.

But in order for us to do that effectively, we have to trust each other and recognize that if someone doesn't know something--if they have literally never learned it before--that's not their fault. If somebody has a stereotype about a group of people, or thinks they know something, but your experience differs, it is your responsibility to help them understand it better; to illustrate the oppositional perspective. 

In this course, we need to aspire to be more culturally competent, more aware, and more curious versions of ourselves. We can never learn it all. There will always be unknown unknowns...but this course is about raising our awareness so they can be known unknowns...so we can begin to recognize that the things we know--the lenses through which we experience the world--are such a smidgen of a much bigger human story. 

Most of the world is an unknown unknown. If we can recognize that simple fact, perhaps the mere shifting of awareness can orient the world toward grasping that our planet can be a  known unknown, meaning that our own ethnocentric perspectives are but one version of reality; "other cultures are not failed attempts at being you" (Wade Davis).

The Fire of Adolescence

It's Friday.

There is a perfectionist that owns a bundle of the real estate deep within me. And right now, all those perfectionist parts in me are berating me with criticism for having watched idly as Thursday passed without having written a new post.  But you know what? I wasn't idle at all. Note remotely.

Instead, I was living alongside my students. Nothing compares to the experiences of watching young people become better versions of themselves; watching them carve away the passive parts of themselves, only to find that there are amazing, capable, brave, and mature young men and women waiting in the wings of their life.

Today I told my students that the past week we spent together in the Adirondacks was equipping them with the ability to become the heroes of their own lives.

Nobody wants to grow complacent.
Nobody wants to be a passive participant in their own lives.
Nobody wants to be cast in their life as "third blond boy" or "girl with the backpack."

But we do it all the time. I find myself reverting to auto pilot on my commutes, my routines, and my interactions.

We need to break form. To take risks.

My students were made to be the heroes. They are protagonists. Their stories are written with deep dreams and meticulously developed character traits. There are internal struggles, foibles, challenges, and climaxes. There are moments that require real heroism, and that elicit deep sorrows.

The shapes of my students' stories are varied and REAL. They are different and they are the same.

And just like that, I am reminded of a moment .

The students looked into a fire, huddled close to one another, and forgot about themselves. Their gazes bled into one another's, and they saw the impossible beauty of the flames, the gleam of the light, the reflection of the moon on the water around them. They stopped being themselves and transformed into a breathing, living organism with its own energy.

Like fires, adolescence can gleam and spark, but it can also grow dull, cool, and turn to ash. This past week reminded me that all fires need three things

Heat
Fuel
& Oxygen

I think, in both a literal and figurative sense, the same is true of human beings.

The origins of their physical heat, their physical fuel, and physical oxygen matter; and so, too, do the sources of emotional heat, emotional fuel, and emotional oxygen.

For four days, we got it right. Now that we return to the classrooms, to the routines, it's all about maintaining the fire triangle, because fires don't work on auto pilot. And I'm pretty sure there's no app that gathers the kindling.

The Both

I love people.

I always have. I enjoy being around them, connecting with them, and being real with them. Which is why I always find it funny that I have such an aversion to my return to school each September.

You see, as I mentioned before, I love the people. I also love the anticipation, the school, the content, the hopefulness, and the rebirth. I love the conversations, the colleagues, the students, too. What I don't love, though, is the simple question that seems to begin every interaction during our first week back:

"How was your summer?"

I used to think that it was because I never went anywhere on vacation. Vacation was time off, but it was never time away. Growing up, I always felt a sense of embarrassment at this fact. "Oh!" my friends would sometimes say, "A stay-cation! That sounds awesome!"

But it wasn't a stay-cation...it was just life. Life happening in my back yard, my world. And it was good--awesome, even--but it certainly wasn't impressive or postcard-worthy.

Yet here's the thing. Even now that I've arrived at a point of greater maturity and self confidence, I still don't like this question. It just feels like when someone says, "Hey, today's my birthday," and the only way to possibly respond is by exclaiming, "Happy Birthday!!" When someone says, "How was your summer?" the requisite response that spills out on cue like TGIF's canned laughter is "Great, how was yours?"

But this year, it feels like I finally figured it out.

I think this feeling comes from the fact that summer is never simple. Summer is never any ONE thing. Summer is everything. Summer is so good, but it is so darn far from perfect. It is great, and awful, and hard, and amazing...and we grow, and learn...but we also forget. We fail. We struggle. See, summer as a teacher or student allows us to get close to our own humanity. We get to spend time with ourselves. We have expectations and goals, some of which are manageable and others that are lofty. Yet when it's all said and done, the summer has happened and it's been SO. MANY. THINGS.

And many of them were things of the hard variety that grow us into wiser, calloused versions of ourselves.

So how does one answer, the "How was your summer?" question?

Well I decided this year to just go for it and acknowledge that my summer was a little bit of everything. As Hunter S. Thompson once remarked,

"Hopes rise and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain."

I have a friend who once shared with me that, in his younger years, he and his friends had adopted the phrase "the both" as a way of acknowledging that he was feeling lots of different things all at once.

"Yo, that movie was the both!"

Or, "Yeah, we broke up...but it's kind of, well, y'know...the both."

So, I decided, when asked about my summer, I'd simply hint at the reality that my summer was the both.

"It was hard and easy, amazing and impossible. Thanks for asking. How was yours?"

And by doing so, I would silently acknowledge the dreamy beautiful days I had with my family and the love for my kids and my wife that deepened and erupted...but I would also acknowledge the reality that there were tantrums and accidents and dishes that broke.

I expected that by hijacking the predicted response of my colleagues and students I'd make things suddenly awkward, but you know what happened? People opened right up.

"Yeah, you're right...me too. Summer was great and hard."

"I know what you mean...my dad is really sick right now."

"My parents are separating."

"There were so many points in my summer that were great, but I didn't do half the stuff I'd planned to."

"I'm so grateful I found a really great therapist. I couldn't have done this summer alone"

It's easy to put on a mask and forget that everyone around us is human. And by holding space for the people around me--the people I care about--I now feel better equipped to be myself. I can now get to work doing the things I'm here to do...to teach, to learn, to connect. To rely on relationships. I can fully be myself while I'm doing it, and my hope is that this feeling is contagious.

Today in English class I asked my 8th graders to identify the strongest emotion they felt over the course of the summer, then write about that moment. They didn't share what they wrote, but as I watched their faces, their eyes, in writing, I could tell that summer, for them, was also the both.

"Their hearts are easy to find."

Thursday came and went last week. It was June 23rd. And for the first time in over two months, I didn't write anything on this blog. My reason? I was so immersed in my family's crazy acclimation to the first week of summer that the days of the week didn't matter. I'd forgotten it was Thursday (or if I knew, I'd forgotten what Thursday meant). It was all-out beautiful, messy survival mode for Team McDonough.

Yet now, as the dust has settled into some semblance of a routine, I am left reflecting on the past three weeks, and how much I've learned.

Here's a start.

The attack at Pulse, the nightclub in Orlando, happened 18 days ago.

My kids started swimming lessons four days ago.

The attack at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul took place two days ago.

93 human beings were killed.
292 human beings remain injured.

Innumerable lives have been torn torn apart.
Futures lost.
Dreams disbanded.
Love, buried in an aching tomb of pain
and chased by a cocktail of asphyxiation,
infused with
anger,
confusion,
forgiveness,
disbelief,
a litany of other emotions.
And grief.

And there was unity.

And there was division.

After the attack in Istanbul, I wrote this poem on a piece of paper. I felt like we have had our hearts broken so many times that there's got to be some cost...some collective destruction...some adverse impact.

On our hearts.

Oh, and in the midst of all this, my kids are learning to swim.

I watch them in the water.

They are learning to trust that their little, slippery, shivering bodies genuinely want to float.
That they are filled with air, and that if they just release themselves from fear--if they trust their teachers--trust their buoyancy, that they can lean back and literally lay on top of the water!

When I watch my daughter swim away from me, a look of simultaneous horror and jubilation spreading through her cheeks...I feel so much love.

When I hold my children in the water I feel their hearts beating--thundering--in their little chests. They are so scared, and so excited...but most of all, they are just so alive.

I re-read my poem.
I am hopeful for my children, and I am sad at the world they are inheriting. But their hearts are so big. They hear about dogs who are abandoned, and their little faces contort in shock and disbelief because they don't understand how someone could leave something alone in the world.

This week as my internet browser toggles between horror and hopelessness, between sit-ins and sinners, between unity and division, my children are teaching me that we need to seek out those moments that make us alive. We need to hear our hearts beat. We need to remember that they won't beat forever, but they beat today. And they are muscles that need us to keep loving so we don't end up with hollow shells that echo beneath our ribs.

Just as my children's bodies want to float, our hearts want to love.

A friend e-mailed me after Istanbul. The message ended like this:

"Enough from me, now go and enjoy your babies...their hearts are easy to find."

May we someday, in the midst of a painful world that is struggling--and far too often failing--to love us back, say the same about our own hearts.

"I wish you so much happiness"

The ninth graders at my school graduated yesterday. 

They looked so handsome, so beautiful, so grown up. 

They made us proud. They gave speeches. 

They listened to wisdom. 

We clapped. 

We swallowed hard. 

Felt lumps in our throats. 

Pretended the bright sun was making us cry.

We heard their words, about how we--their teachers--

had seen their weaknesses and made them strong.

We heard how they now have the courage and confidence

to make a positive contribution to the world.

The chorus sang two songs.

I heard them sing a new song.

"Once I was seven years old, my mama told me," the lyrics began.

" 'Go make some friends or you'll be lonely.' "

I heard them sing an old song, too.

"Imagine all the people..." 

The words of both songs wafted on the wind, gliding over the audience and into the air. When the last chords were played, we were left in momentary silence.

In that moment, the link between these two songs struck me.

People. 

We need people. 

We need them because they're the antidote for loneliness, but also because they're the hope for the future. We imagine people, crave people, and we grieve for a world where people are kinder to people.

All of the graduates, as they said their goodbyes, wanted to see the people. They didn't wander back to classrooms, they craved connections, eye contact, wisdom, embraces.

They wanted to thank the people, hug the people, lean into the people, and feel the warmth of their bodies. 

They wanted their teachers, for they were the people who raised them, challenged them, watched them grow, and now stood like an aging forest of sturdy trees, so proud of the strong trees their saplings had become.

It's funny that schools are run by people; that teachers are one of the jobs that can't be replaced by machines. Sometimes I wish that I could. That I could be all things to all students. That I could be a pedagogical Swiss Army knife for their every academic and emotional need. 

But people can't do that.

People are flawed.

People mess up.

People are broken.

There is this machine called the Coca-Cola Freestyle that can dispense 165 different custom Coke drinks and flavors. From. The. Same. Machine.

Sometimes I wish that was me. That my students could hit a button and select the methods of instruction that work best with their learning style. I could connect to the auditory learners who love projects and music just as well as I could meet the needs of the multiple choice test-takers who love lectures and need to walk around while they think. Then, those kinesthetic thinkers who need to move around, and the auditory learners who need to hear things, and those students who struggle with executive functions and learn best with a graphic organizer and a teacher beside them, could all just hit a button and I could be that.

If someone needs corny jokes to relax? Presto, just hit the custom teacher button and the teacher fits the need.

If someone else needs a disciplinarian to keep them in line? Boom. The Freestyle Teacher is a master of restorative justice.

But people aren't like that. We can't be all things for all students. And, as teachers, graduation reminds us of this because, just as happy as we are to hug our former students and watch, admiringly, as they walk into the sunset of their future, there are also students who we think we might have missed; students for whom we could have done a little more, connected with more deeply.

But we're human. And we need humans. And there will be more humans to connect with those students, and that is all we can hope for: that the sum of a student's educational journey--whether it happens in a school or not--will include people who connect with that student. People who see them, and who leave them feeling fuller and more equipped to navigate the world where people are imperfect. And yet there is so much good in the midst of our mistakes, our risks, our flaws. Teachers bring out that good in children. They can see weakness and turn it into strength. And when they can't, they can trust that they did their best, and there will be other mentors and teachers and inspirations awaiting that child.

One of the graduates left a note in my mailbox.

It made me cry.

It ended with, 

"I wish you so much happiness..."

What a line.

What a good word.

That's my wish for my students, too.

That they would find their Coke Freestyle.

That their life would become the flavor that suits them.

I wish them so much happiness.

Freedom

The other day, something popped up on my Twitter feed that gave me pause.

If what it means to be 'educated' has changed, why hasn't the mechanism for becoming educated? #WednesdayWisdom

A response to this tweet soon followed:

Has what it means to be educated actually changed?

In all honesty, as I thought about this question, I became unsure...

Can someone actually receive an education? Is it bestowed, or is it achieved? Is it stalked like prey, or is it discovered like a treasure? Is it slain like a dragon, or liberated like a besieged castle? Is it built like a house, or conjured out of nothing like an alchemist's elixir?

Or, perhaps, an education is simply the sum of that which sticks.

When someone says, "I  got a crummy education in high school," what do they actually mean? What did they learn? If the answer is "nothing," who is to blame?

I don't entirely know where I'm going with this, but I saw a circularity to three interactions with students this week.

1. During a "This I Believe" speech, one of our 9th graders spoke about the reality that there's more to life than getting into Andover or Harvard...that getting over the pressure, embracing her own trajectory--one that was a complete rough draft, a work in progress--mattered more than anything else.

2. I watched a former student toe the line at Hayward Field in Eugene, OR last night. He had run on the cross country team when I was the assistant coach during my second year of teaching. He had been fast, but nothing extraordinary. I watched this student run 1500 meters in 3:41. He qualified for the finals on Friday. Surrounded by nearly 10,000 screaming fans, with the name of his Ivy league college adorning his chest, he breathed, strained, and exploded across the finish line in a blur of euphoria, sinews, and sweat.

3. I ran into the father of a former student last week. In 8th grade, the student had been in my advisory, and the family shared their plan for college: "[She] is going to get a college scholarship for field hockey," they said. "That is the plan." And it worked. Four years later, she enrolled at Quinnipiac University on a full scholarship. In the first week of practice during her freshman year, she tore her ACL. Over the course of the recovery process, she realized she wanted to play sports at a Division III school--there would be less pressure, more opportunity--and she transferred to a small college in North Carolina. A year later, she realized that in all of the pressure of making field hockey her life, of attending camps, practicing, practicing, practicing, it wasn't what she loved to do anymore. She had lost the love of the game that identified her. So, again, she transferred. This time, she wanted to go somewhere that was big enough for her to stretch herself, to reclaim her identity, to discover herself again...to be free. "So she's headed to Ohio State in the fall," her dad told me. "And she wants to be a teacher! Can you believe that...she loves it, loves the kids, the possibilities."

One of these students has carved his place in the world through sports. Another found that, once life humbled her--threw her a different direction, a new opportunity--it granted her the opportunity to explore her surroundings, to slow down and ask, "Who am I?"

One of my favorite educational theorists, bell hooks, wrote about this in the first book about teaching I ever loved, Teaching to Transgress:

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.” 

Sometimes, it's a different mountaintop.

When I was 16, I was in a horrible car accident.

Horrible.

I was driving, I became distracted, swerved, overcompensated, hit the snow at 65mph and went airborne.

It took them three hours to dig the car out.

Miraculously, all four of us survived this wreck.

It took a long time for me to heal.

Another thing this accident did, though, was it forced me to stop playing soccer and lacrosse. 

I took up running. I started writing poetry.

Suddenly, running and poetry were what sustained me. 

I wrote this--the beginning of a poem about what life was teaching me--a year later as I continued to process what it meant to have the view of my life change; what it meant to have my plan erased.

Here's what the unexpected does to us: it complicates things...it makes us hurt...it cauterizes our innocence...it curdles the sweet parts. But it also grows us, prunes us. It makes us free. 

As 17 year-old me once wrote, we've always wondered about this freedom, but we've never known to ask.

Freedom is scary, but it is new, and if we take the opportunity to reconnect with the present-tense version of ourselves, we gain perspective.

And that's when, as bell hooks goes on to explain, "education [is] about the practice of freedom."

At moments of rebirth, our education really begins. 

Education hasn't changed, it's still about the practice of freedom. If we can invite the personal into our educational narratives; if we can embrace the humbling moments of failure, struggle, and interrupted plans, then we can reclaim the mechanism for becoming educated, and liberate that beautiful, beating glob of muscle in our chests.

Bigger than Rushmore

Today I had a student leave an anonymous note on my desk thanking me for the year. It hit me deep. Humbled me. And it got me thinking about my teachers.

You see, eight years ago, Malcom Gladwell wrote one of the most fascinating articles on teaching I’ve ever read. Appearing in The New Yorker, Gladwell's article claimed that the professions of teacher and football quarterback were similar in one important area:  

there is nearly no way to predict which college graduates will achieve greatness at their given profession.  

Once the QBs/Teachers rise to the professional level, they are quickly critiqued and assessed and, within four or five years, they have either solidly established themselves as capable, flexible innovators, or they are out of the profession.

Woah.

Why has this concept risen to the front of my cerebral cortex again?  Fantasy sports.  

See, here’s my thought.  Imagine there was a fantasy teacher draft at a given school.  Who would go first?  Who would go last?  In what quantitative areas would teachers be evaluated?

Now, imagine all of the teachers you've ever had...who would you draft first, and what is it that made them great? Pushed them to the top of your draft board?

Are they tangible metrics, or intangible imaginaries? Are they gut feelings, or are they quantitative statistical metrics?

Maya Angelou told us that we will forget what people do and say, but we will never forget how someone makes us feel. Does this hold the key to how we remember our favorite teachers? Were are favorite teachers actually good at teaching? 

Today, as I reminisced, I looked back on my teachers, and here is my draft board:

1. Topher Waring 
2. Darren Redman 
3. Sydney King
4. Matt Cheney
5.  Lisa Travis
6. Kit Wilson
7. Rick Elkin
8. Jonathan Miller-Lane

In short, these people were all amazing because of who they were & the curiosity and passion they brought to the classes they taught. 

Mr. Waring was my science teacher in middle school. He built a solar car with us. And not a little soapbox derby car. He had us convert a 1969 VW microbus into a solar-electric behemoth named Helios the Heron that ran off of the sun's energy and 24 Dekka Dominator Gel Cel batteries. He also built a hot air balloon with us, he taught me how to identify trees, he taught me how to build a wing that would fly, and he helped me map the human body. He empowered me to love learning, and to see the connections that could be made. Mr. Waring was curious, and he gave us no choice but to join him in his joyful pursuit of the world beyond our classroom walls.

Mr. Redman played music while we took tests. He wore bow ties, taught me what decorum meant, spoke with crisp rhetoric, read the newspaper and carried it around with him. He played the guitar and sang "Blackbird" to his infant daughter during a faculty talent show. He built a house in the woods of Maine from the ground up. He would tell us we were "on the cusp of greatness" when we were close, but not quite there. He gave us quizzes each day and called tests "opportunities for success." He ended up being my college counselor and referred to my college visits as "filling out my dance card." He was my Atticus Finch, the man whose moral character seemed impossible to break, who was the epitome of what it meant to be a man, and whose intellectual depth and quality of character seemed to sparkle as he spoke.

Ms. King was an art teacher. I never had her in class, but she was the adult I knew I could talk to about anything. She was my rock during my parents' divorce, during pain. She was the first teacher I saw to be a human being with feelings, who suffered, knew pain, just like I did. Behind her wire-rimmed glasses she used to give me a knowing look whenever I jumped contagiously into activities like washing dishes in the cafeteria, or sorting recycling during our daily campus jobs. I remember when she announced she was getting married and knowing that we were losing a little of her. That we were no longer her priorities, and that was about right.

Mr. Cheney pushed me. He welcomed me into the world of Paul Bowles, Nikolai Gogol, Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Celan. He made me feel like his equal, and he read us poems he'd written when he was our age. He directed the first real play I was ever in; he taught me to sing, to dance, encouraged me to shave my head with a razor, and coached me to speak in a Yiddish accent. When I graduated from high school he gave me a book. In it he wrote, "With thanks for your support over the past 4 years, for your seriousness as an English student, and your decency as a human being." I have tried to live up to the last one every day since.

Mrs. Travis was a dancer. She convinced me to take a dance elective. When I confessed that I'd taken the class because there was a pretty girl I wanted to be around, she told me she had to accept me into the class, and she did so because I was a dancer. I took risks. I stopped laughing at myself. I kick ball changed. I leaped. I improvised. I choreographed. I performed. I evolved.

Professor Wilson taught one class per semester that met once a week for 3 hours from 7-10pm. He told stories the entire time. He taught me about the beauty of painting. He taught me about Frederick Law Olmstead and the genesis behind Central Park; about James Fenimore Cooper; about the Catskills; about the origins of the term "rambling" and how it used to be a valued pastime that always ended with a picnic by a brook; he inspired me to ramble to the Catskills on a snowy Saturday with a stack of paintings, trying to find the spot they had been painted a century earlier. He taught me to memorize the Bible to better understand Biblical paintings. He taught me that the best way to begin a class is to tell your students about something that happened to you that week that made you think of them.

Rick Elkin taught me about pottery; about how to use my hands; about the power of vessels. He showed me what wabi sabi means, and how there is hidden beauty in letting a pit fire have its way with your vessel--in yielding to the earth and the flames. He sat with me in the dark for hours beside the outside kiln he'd built with us, watching bright New Hampshire stars flickering overhead, the glow of the kiln constant and orange. He told stories, he never minced words. He rode a mountain bike. Years later, I found him in New Mexico and he made an engagement ring for my future wife.

Jonathan heard me say, "I'll never be a teacher. That's too easy...I want to do something that's a challenge." He replied, "It's easy to be a bad teacher. But you might think it looks easy because you'd be pretty good at it." His advice was the best I've ever taken. He told me that on my worst day in the classroom, I can still be a positive role model for my students. He told me I didn't have to shave my beard when I applied for a teaching job. He showed me how to redirect energy using Aikido tactics. He said that was the key to teaching--redirecting energy that already existed in the universe, but never imposing your energy on another.


I suppose my conclusion is that teaching is nothing like being a quarterback. Sure, both are hard to predict when it comes to predicting greatness. But when comparing the metrics of a great quarterback to the stories of great teachers, my fantasy team is beyond numbers, they're bigger than Rushmore, and they outlast the words I could ever use to praise them.

The craft of of being human

My eighth graders sat transfixed, their eyes locked on Frank Kwei as he poured hot water over the crude, red-brown teapot he held in his hands.

"Doesn't that water burn your fingers?" one of them asked.

"I suppose it does," smiled Frank, now pouring the steaming water over a basket of beautiful jasmine pearls. He circled his pot, cascading the water down so as to douse each pearl with a thin stream. As the water graced each of their surfaces, the pearls unfurled, revealing beautiful wet green leaves that stretched their arms upward.

"Then why do you do it?" she asked, curious.

"It is ritual...a part of the craft." Frank's words emerged from his lips slowly, a calm smile following each word. He went on,
"My job is to help people slow down, and each of the rituals in my preparation of this tea helps me to slow down, too."

It was the day before my eighth grade world cultures classes were to present their research at the annual World Congress Symposium. This particular group, the Human Rights task force, had a mere 26 hours before they would sit in front of their peers and deliver their findings, synthesis, and solutions. Yet as we visited Frank Kwei at his tea pavilion, any anxiety remained undetectable on their faces. They were rapt by the subject matter, enamored by the tea being prepared for them. They had slowed down, and there was no place for anxiety to fit in.

Frank spoke again.

"When someone prepares you tea, you do not have to enjoy the tea. But you do have to respect it. Thousands of years have gone into its creation. The soil, the science, the cultivation, the mastery, the wisdom."

My students sip.
They struggle to describe what they taste.
They whisper.

"Burnt toast."
"Seaweed."
"Nutty steam."

"Those are tannins," says Frank.
"Yes, now let it touch all the parts of your tongue," he encourages.
"What are the two flavors doing to each other?"

They respect the tea.

Frank shows them a teapot made of ceramic.

"This is a bowl and a lid."

The students can't argue. It is. Bowl and lid.

"People have been making tea with a bowl and lid for thousands of years. Could they develop a more modern way to make tea?"

The students answer yes.

Of course.

"If something is beautiful, efficient, simple, and it has worked for 4,000 years. Leave it alone."

My students walk quietly as we leave. Tomorrow they will teach me about the world. They will teach me about how their generation has unfinished business. How they will be the ones responsible for solving world hunger, illiteracy, air pollution, and deforestation. They will teach me that 15 people die of hunger every minute; that malaria is one of the largest killers in world history; that stem cell research might hold the key to solving Alzheimer's Disease; that our earth, with its oceans and winds already does everything we need to energize our future.

I am reminded that behind all of our anxiety, our technology, our social awareness, our flaws, our hopes, are mammals. Awesome mammals. Mammals who have been doing something beautiful, efficient, simple, for thousands of years.  Problems have been solved, and problems we can't predict are beyond the horizon.

We do need to evolve, but in our evolving, we also need to leave ourselves alone. We need to focus on the simplicity of slowing down. Because in our slowing, in the midst of our lives, we see the connections that lead to possibilities.

Life hurts sometimes, but it is our ritualistic nature that helps us heal, retain hope.

It is part of the craft of being human.

Choices

On the night before my wedding, my best man reassured a young and anxious me:

There are ten things that are going to go wrong tomorrow. My job is to make sure you don't know about any of them. You have a choice: either let me take care of it, or worry.

I had a choice. I could trust my friend, Tucker, to care for me, or I could worry. With the exception of Hurricane Danny's surprise arrival, I never found out what else went wrong (and I learned that rainy photos are really beautiful).

We make choices all the time about how to act, how to respond, how to be.

I was thinking about this moment this week as my 8th grade world cultures students discussed the Japanese response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. What was it about the Japanese culture, their psyche, values, their ethos, that allowed them to withhold outward resentment?

They made a choice.

When my 7th graders discussed Atticus Finch's "universe of obligation" in To Kill a Mockingbird, they recognized that he was hedging the cultural norms...that he was taking a risk, and there was a cost involved.

He made a choice.

As I watched the Environmental and Human Rights task forces prepare for World Congress this week, their peer-elected leaders guiding their final preparations and rehearsals, I saw the emphasis they were putting on human choices.

We have a choice here, my students reminded me.
We cause these problems.
Doing the right thing is inconvenient, sure, but change doesn't come about because it's cozy. Sometimes it hurts. You've got to give something up to transform.

We are making choices.

During our study of To Kill a Mockingbird this year, we've used a resource called "Facing History, Facing Ourselves." The motto of this educational resource is

People make choices; choices make history.

Woah. What a line. It's one of those sentences you almost want to read twice. Read slower.

People make choices;
choices make history.

My division head has always suggested that those tricky 7th - 9th grade years of early adolescence are really about two things: independent learning and relationships. And both of those areas have to do with choices.

On a related note, my school has adopted a new disciplinary practice this spring. We've replaced detentions with a more responsive process requiring students whose actions (i.e. choices) require a disciplinary response to have a conversation with their teacher and produce a written reflection to a prompt.

In short, we want our students to see patterns in their actions. We want them to see that their choices illustrate their histories, and that there are subsequent choices that can dictate their futures. We want them to understand that, like my best man assured me, there are people who can support us, but we have to make a choice to lean on them. Discipline shouldn't be shameful, it should be restorative. It should help us see the patterns of our choices, and the ways they affect our learning and our relationships.

Like Tucker said, ten things will probably go wrong today, but we have a choice about how we react to those trials.

Whether it's the ethos of a nation, the character of a father in 1930s Alabama, our collective global impact, or our individual actions in middle school, we make our choices, and our choices make history.

Binding Off

[Note: yesterday my school welcomed Marc Brackett, Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to campus. Our time spent with him impacted much of my conscience as I wrote this post]


I've been learning lots from my students lately. Lots. 

This sort of thing always happens in the spring. Just as we begin preparing to bind off this experience we've created together (just as my Granny Ros used to bind off her knitting projects); as the synapses are firing; and curiosity and subject matter converge; and the classroom culture is manifest; and we're all steaming forward alongside one another; and we've hit our rhythm as a unit...the year ends.

Final exams are administered, grades are earned, and this experience we've shared together becomes a heap of feelings, events, and growth, that quickly bursts into summer. And it's over.

Yet never in the year do I learn more from my students than in the final six weeks of a school year.

The other day I asked my students to write personal vignettes on the topic of "Speaking Up." It fit with To Kill a Mockingbird, and it represented another opportunity for my students to write from their hearts--an activity that almost always yields their best writing. I'd borrowed the idea from The Sun Magazine, an amazing ad-free literary publication that allows readers to submit short, autobiographical pieces on a common topic. So, we read a handful of "Speaking Up" submissions from  The Sun that dealt with pretty heavy topics and talked about what the stories made us feel.

These were stories that hurt. Stories that were hard to tell.

As I presented the assignment to the students, I added, "now your 'speaking up' stories might not be as intense or emotionally raw as these ones, and you might consider using an instance when you wish you'd spoken up, or where you saw someone else speak up and gained respect for them..."

I kept talking.

But, as usual, I said too much. In an effort to scaffold for my students, to provide differentiated structure for the ones who wanted options, I underestimated both their creativity and the breadth and depth of their own life experiences.

I forgot how much a 12 or 13 year-old feels.

I'm particularly embarrassed by this because I think about my students' emotions all the time...I care about them...I genuinely try to listen when we talk. And still, I forgot how much they feel, how varied their experiences are.

The answer is everything.

They feel it all.

And, frankly, this assignment wouldn't have been as rich in September as it is now. The trust we've built--the conversations we've had--have carved a channel from their wounded, courageous words to my heart that they could not have fabricated nine months ago. Writing can do this. It can put words to what can't be said. It can illustrate feelings. It can be a way to heal.

They have been hurt, and they have shown amazing courage in the face of hurt, but it's the process of writing that really allows them to get right with their feelings.

I often think of my role as a teacher as one of those scouts from old westerns who rides his horse to the hill, scanning the horizon for threats in the distance. As the wagon train sleeps in the field below, he (for they're usually men) ensures that everyone is safe, and he surveys the landscape for all that is to come, both the good and the bad. He looks ahead. He literally has pro vision. He is the provider.

As men and women who teach, we must see ourselves as emotional providers for our students. This doesn't mean we have to give our students anything other than an opening to share, and an opening to admit that there's more to the world than school. That their education involves everything they see, and hear...but it also is everything they feel. We provide in a curricular sense by seeing them as learners, and by supporting their development, but that can't be all.

Jamie Tworkowski wrote a book entitled If You Feel Too Much. It's really good. In it, he writes this.

“If this world is too painful, stop and rest. It’s okay to stop and rest. If you need a break, it’s okay to say you need a break. This life –it’s not a contest, not a race, not a performance, not a thing that you win. It’s okay to slow down. You are here for more than grades, more than a job, more than a promotion, more than keeping up, more than getting by.This life is not about status or opinion or appearance. You don’t have to fake it. You do not have to fake it. Other people feel this way too. If your heart is broken, it’s okay to say your heart is broken. If you feel stuck, it’s okay to say you feel stuck. If you can’t let go, it’s okay to say you can’t let go.You are not alone in these places. Other people feel how you feel. You are more than just your pain."

My students reminded me of this. 

I knew it, but I had to relearn it.

Sometimes quiet can get you there. Sometimes a conversation can do it. And sometimes, it helps to write.

I have a photograph of myself as a 7th grader that sits on my desk. As I glance over at myself now, I feel silly for forgetting how much I felt back then. I forget that I am the person who felt like they feel. Who still does. That I still feel too much sometimes. And that we all need to take a second to stop and rest to survey the horizon...because even when we bind off into the sunset at the end of our school year, the story isn't over. We're always feeling. And in our feeling, we can learn. And in our learning we can grow toward the next horizon.

Wabi Sabi

Each year, my school holds a "Grandparents and Special Friends Day."

And it's awesome.

The whole day becomes somewhat muted. The students move slower, speak more quietly, hold doors longer. They give up their seats, they give directions. Patience, and kindness, and a chivalrous calm win the day.

This year it was rainy and gray. A perfect day to move slowly.

For the most part, grandparents are so thrilled to watch their grandchildren; so proud to see the limbs of their family tree so soundly secured to the vision they've had for their family.

Blossoming.

As for me, along with connecting with our visitors, asking questions, gently shaking hands (and offering the crook of my elbow whenever I can find the opportunity), I try to guide my classroom conversations in a direction that will involve our celebrated guests.

For my 7th grade English class, this meant a discussion of wisdom and knowledge as we analyzed Scout and Jem's visit to Calpurnia's church in chapter 12 of To Kill a Mockingbird. Grandparents smiled as students admitted that they "don't know too many 13 year-olds they would describe as particularly wise."

"Who are the people in your lives who are wise?" I ask.

Nobody needs to answer. Everybody smiles.

Wisdom comes with making mistakes. It comes with living. With taking risks.
Life humbles you, and you grow.

For my 8th grade World Cultures class, our time together included a conversation about wabi sabi. I read them a children's book by Mark Reibstein that defines it like this.

Wabi Sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture. If finds beauty and harmony in what is simple, imperfect, natural, modest, and mysterious. It can be a little dark, but it is also warm and comfortable. Still, for many in Japanese culture, it is best understood as a feeling, rather than an idea. 

I hadn't thought much about the impact this word would have on Grandparents and Special Friends Day. I like the word, and that was enough. Still, it represents one of those instances where I end up jumping around my classroom yelling things like,

ISN'T THIS SO COOL?!

AREN'T YOU AMAZED BY THIS?!

DON'T YOU WANT TO HAVE THIS WORD, AND OWN THIS WORD, AND ADOPT IT, AND LOVE IT, AND HAVE IT IN YOUR MIND, AND USE IT IN YOUR MOUTH, AND SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS?

But on Grandparents and Special Friends Day, I didn't have to. They got it. All of them. They saw that there's a little "beautiful ugly" in wabi sabi. That it's digging your toes beneath the hot sand to find the cool. It's the fright and thrill of thunder. It's the nighttime sounds you cannot see. It's smells you love, not because they're good, but because they're familiar. It's the stained carpets and chipped mugs that punctuate the rhythm of our days.

Of course, they also made connections to the yin and yang of Taoism, and the escape from earthly desires of Buddhism. They had the scholarship because we were in school. They had the curiosity because they like the course and are innately curious. But they also had the mindfulness to slow down...to be still in the moment. They were just...so...present.

I wrote last week about not having enough time, and here's what yesterday taught me:

We have enough time. We've just got to figure out how to spend it well. Grandparents and Special Friends Day granted us the opportunity to slow down. There was a mutual understanding that this was a day about being present, and about taking it slow.

I love seeing the circularity of the subjects I teach: English, world cultures, and American history. Whether we're discussing why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird; or why Siddhartha grieved for the suffering of the destitute; or what compels a human to so easily shed morality in the name of personal gain, there is so much knowledge to understand...but if we're able to take a moment to be still, to soak in the details, we just might encounter the place where our hearts meet our minds.

It's a feeling I don't think we have a word for. It's a feeling I like, and a feeling that makes me sad.

It's wabi sabi.