I’ve started, deleted, and restarted this post so many times I can’t even remember what I originally attempted to write, but… DUDE.
If you are a teacher or a parent, or any member of society really, this week has been, uh, fraught.
I’m having a slight existential crisis about it all (don’t worry; happens all the time), so this post is half-baked at best, but here are a few things that have been on my mind the past few days. I mean, other than the panicked bleating of my own personal anxiety llama—but that’s difficult to spell phonetically.
First, I was listening to Oprah’s Super Soul podcast this weekend (I will not hear your criticism) and she said something so lovely I wrote it down: “Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past could have been any different.”
Yes.
I would also propose that, slightly amended, that is a perfect definition of acceptance. Acceptance is letting go of the hope that the present could be any different.
The present is what it is. Anything you could have done to change it (IF there was anything you could have done to change it) has come and gone. We can only make changes to affect what happens next. Considering how rapidly my world has shifted over the past 72 hours alone, I suspect change is going to be the theme of my next several posts. (Unless the world ends before I can post another one! *nervous laughter* You know, because of the supervolcano, right? Heh heh, AM I RIGHT?? …I’m dying inside.)
Second, and similarly, I was re-listening to Warrior Goddess Training a couple of days ago, and I wrote down HeatherAsh Amara’s advice to herself on change: “When you step toward, rather than fight or resist change, you reclaim your personal freedom. You step onto a path of transformation, and move from being a victim of change to being a co-creator WITH change.”
Okay, yes please. I do not wish to be bludgeoned over the head with change. I want to extend my hand to change and figure out how to repurpose the bludgeon into a novelty lamp we can sell on Etsy. I want to accept that tomorrow won’t look like yesterday, and then mold my future into something my soul needs, something that uses my gifts, something that heals me and, by the universal law of healing contagion, heals others as well.
That brings me to my third related reference, which I haven’t read in at least fifteen years but is lighting up in my memory this week like a Kenny Rogers Chicken sign: The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. It’s old-school YA dystopian fiction, with America degenerated into a wasteland of violence, scarce resources, and corporatized outposts of civilization (♪ these are a few of my faaaaaavorite things ♪). In the face of ever-present trauma and despair, the teenaged main character creates her own religion, which I just realized was KIND OF A BOLD MOVE FOR A YA NOVEL IN 1993, and which she summarizes thusly:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”
I’ll tell you what these verses meant to me as a 20-year-old college student reading Octavia Butler in her tiny campus apartment: Nothing. Nada. A polar bear eating a marshmallow in a snowstorm.
I’ll tell you what these verses mean to me now, as a 37-year-old teacher and parent living through either the end or the beginning of times: Truth.
Even if you feel helpless right now (I wouldn’t know ANYTHING about that, but you know, just in case, for you), let’s go with Octavia Butler and rest assured that what we do matters. It matters not only for the ever-changing humongous world we’re co-creating each tiny movement at a time, but also for the way it will rebound and transform us as individuals. It matters, you matter, I matter. We have agency and choice and we’re going to get through this.
Okay, and if none of that helped, here’s Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals. I’ll write something more coherent next week, IF HUMANITY MAKES IT THAT LONG. Just kidding. Sort of.
