Friends, this week brought me back to the classroom after a much-appreciated summer holiday. It’s a privilege to have a fresh start at my age. While I take solace in servitude, the first week back can be exhausting, emotionally and otherwise. It’s also very exciting, perhaps overwhelmingly so, for students and teachers alike.
A lot of my people this week have been talking about how tired they are. I often wonder what people really mean when they say they are tired. I mean, maybe they are legit tired. Tired happens. But as often as not, they are anxious, agitated, frustrated, scared, overstimulated, or some combination thereof.
Regardless of the source of the feeling, I spent this week with my Gen Z pals, most of whom were tired and/or “tired”, endeavoring to introduce myself and my classes to them. To set the stage. To open a safe but challenging space. To dispel myths and clarify expectations. To this end, I walked my six classes through my syllabi, all of which begin as follows:
Introduction: I have strong beliefs about history and history education, some of which I feel obliged to share on our first day together:
History is important. We don’t need it to live; we need it to live well.
Through studying other cultures and other times, we develop a more thorough sense of self.
History is not only about the facts, it’s about the narratives and interpretations.
History is not only about the past, it’s about the relationship between past and present.
We create histories together, as communities.
Studying history is essential to creating a more just and sustainable future.
Nobody’s history is superior to nor more interesting than anybody else’s. We can learn important lessons by studying any era or any culture.
Studying history cultivates our reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills.
Then after we slow walk through the course content and classroom community expectations, my syllabi conclude as follows:
“Perhaps most importantly: I am available to you as a personal and professional resource. My interest in history cannot rival my interest in you and your health and well-being. If you have concerns, anxieties, or frustrations or if you just want someone to talk to, it is my honor and my pleasure to just be there with you.”
I feel like I did a reasonably respectable job creating a space for empathic engagement. Now I have nine months to fuck it up.
I’ll do my best not to. Promise.
In between classes and navigating my daughter’s “big feelings” about being back at school, I had the pleasure to correspond with a couple Sabbateur readers (and podcast alums) about last week’s exploration of spirituality.
I discussed with Scott Robbin (aka Howard Maple, the world’s most coveted pet eulogist) how the spiritual path, which I increasingly see essentially as living with joy and gratitude, is not always pursued extracurricularly. In other words, spiritual life is not necessarily a set of practices distinct from working, parenting, shopping, cooking, or cleaning.
Spirituality ain’t so pristine, it's profane.
This was echoed by another Sabbateur reader, Joshua Weiner. In addition to being one of my most inspiring podcast guests (how inspiring? I wrote this song based on his poetry translation and later composed this psychedelic journey with a cento of his poems), Joshua seems to, in my humble opinion, embody and present many of the spiritual sensibilities I aspire to. He wrote poetically, as my poet pal is wont to do, about how to earnestly live a life of service, as I seek to do, with a stronger sense of joy. He posed the practice of “complete abandonment of personal territory.”
He also shared this Zen koan with me:
A student asked Soen Nakagawa during a meditation retreat, “I am very discouraged. What should I do?” Soen replied, “Encourage others.”
I told Joshua that this week, in the throes of a fresh school year, in my effort to encourage others, I've been wondering if my work in the classroom, while adding so much to my life, keeps me grounded, yet uneasy. Grounded because teaching offers me routine and ritual, vision, and community. Uneasy because I am surrounded by adolescents with all their searching and itching and angst, strong enough to be free, yet caged. Their energy! It inspires and unsettles me. I inhale their discontent, day by day.
Like I said last week, bringing joy to my professional practice has been the primary goal since the pandemic ravaged my sacred space. Your boy is having fun and sparking joy for at least a few students along for the ride. But listen white girls, this shit ain’t easy.
But it gets easier with guidance. Almost 30 years ago, when the wheels just about fell off the Lazar bus, Scott Robbin gifted me The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Game changer. Years later I discovered a series of riveting Watt’s lectures on CD, now available on the YouTubes.
This week, in the few spare moments allowed to me, I made the chance to re-read a few pages of this book that once upon a time was biblical to me.
Before I wake up my kid to tussle to get to the 7:15 train, I want ro to share a few passages I highlighted in the 1990’s:
“Transitoriness is depressing only to the mind which insists upon trying to grasp. But to the mind which lets go and moves with the flow of change, which becomes, in Zen Buddhist imagery, like a ball in a mountain stream, the sense of transience or emptiness becomes a kind of ecstasy…the process of rebirth is from moment to moment, so that one is being reborn so long as one identifies himself with a continuing ego which reincarnates itself afresh at each moment of time.”
“Yet however much za-zen may have been exaggerated in the Far East, a certain amount of ‘sitting just to sit’ might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies of Europeans and Americans–provided they do not use it as a method for turning themselves into Buddhas.”
Suzuki was once asked how it feels to have attained satori, the Zen experience of “awakening,” he answered, “just like ordinary, every day experience, except about two inches off the ground!”
As if my return to school and to Buddhism wasn’t enough this week, I also dropped two podcasts, both of which make me very happy.
On For a Living, I shared my interview with Steve Berman, who works to guarantee that films are made on time and on budget. He is also a kind and clever fella.
On the CoGoPod, I shared my interview with Eduardo Magalhães III, Professor of Political Science at Simpson College and Chief Reader of the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam.
A’ight kids. Time to wake drive week one of school into the station. Year 24 for me, year 5 for mini-me. All in all we’re just another brick in the wall.
Now I will leave you with a reminder from Joshua.
A monk to Yun Men:
“What are the teachings of a whole lifetime?”
“An appropriate statement”
-DL
I’m learning how rituals that mark time matter to me. So this year, I am carving out an hour or so on Friday to sit quietly before my family wakes to write about what I obsessed about that week. If you enjoy this weekly reflection, please subscribe so I can send it to you every Friday.