The heartbeat of my life looks different lately. I have been away from this blog because I have not wanted to ramble, and I knew I would if I started to type. I have not come up with much in the hiatus, save for the idea that there are signs of age adding life experiences to who I have always been. Life does this to everyone...this adding of experience to age and coming up with newness. Sometimes it makes life more difficult and lots of other times, it makes everything very simple. Right now my life is more heart thought than head knowledge, even though much of my day spent sharing knowledge and articulating historical analysis. While both angles need to be managed and used in my life, I see that there is more peace when I live first out of the heart. It puts everything else together.
It helped when I recently made a real distinction between the stories of others and the story that is mine. I have empathy for a lot of things, which can be very beautiful, but it can also be really heart wrenching. When teaching middle school, I witness a lot of awkward moments. Moments that students are still trying to piece together. Sometimes it's appropriate for me to intervene, and sometimes it's better if I just stay quiet because silence is an apt teacher. (But it still doesn't make it any less awkward.)
If I'm not careful, empathy can trickle over to how I teach, because I know that, even despite unknown historical inaccuracies, these stories I tell were real life for people a set number of years ago. I imagine what it was like to be them and how they dealt with things like the defining moments that I am talking about all day. Being this descriptive allows for a good story, but it can also be exhausting. The stories already happened - I know that. But making history that alive in the day does help in the understanding of people. And history is always about people.
This is starting to sound like the classroom.
What I meant to say is that living from your own self, seeing plainly the thing in front of you and studying it without empathy as the paramount lens through which it is seen, is a lot more striking right now. Add to that the reality that when we live our own story, we are not able to see end thoughts right away. We are in the middle of our stories. (Repeat this, history teacher, who loves the continual inquiry that precedes final analysis. Repeat.) You cannot always live your heart-filled life the way you can teach someone else's in the classroom.
For these reasons, I have without once again become a very present person. When it's your own adventure you see what it is like to be in the thick of it all. And that's the thing that you never have when you see it from afar in another time period. The things that make everything very real about people...like their silences and the music they choose and what it's like when they really laugh with you. I am choosing to see this in the daily life, and it of course makes everything richer too.
Here is a good example. I went on a run this weekend. Down, down, down the winding hills (soon to go up, up, up them - hello, Stillwater) and as I was running, a little boy in his front yard saw me. He was carrying a Super Soaker (or the equivalent of it today) and ran into the street shouting at me, asking if he could squirt me.
It was such a funny moment, and it made me laugh right away, and then when I said yes, there he was, about half as tall as me, squirting me on the leg because that's how tall his squirt gun was. And I ran away laughing at this, and he shouted things down the street at me like, 'I've cooled you down!' and 'That will help your energy!' Later, in the up, up, up the hill moments, he saw me and shouted at his mom, 'Hey I know that girl! I've seen her before!'
It made me think about the middle of the story, and how much you see there that doesn't find its way to the history books. There's a lot in the middle that is rich and uncomfortable and disconcerting and very thrilling. It's when people come up with quotes that fill the spaces in your own time of questioning. Things like, 'It's always darkest before the dawn' and any quote about ebb and flow. You miss that if you only mine through old things. Or even new things.
But I'm not missing it right now. I'm living in the present, and it's exhilarating and fun, and also wistful and horrible, and in the end uncertain and yet very certain all at once. I'm studying the world as it is, and doing this makes room for grace and peace and room to breathe.
I will say that this 'redefining story' approach really did come in time too. I had to talk about the Holocaust for 5 hours straight on Friday (with vivid images and descriptions from primary sources), and before I did this, I told my friend that I would partition my empathy to a place of connectedness now. I would look into the eyes of those people in pictures and say the things that mark our attempt to understand, but respect from a distance the definitively different story holding that time together too. So instead I felt as though I had very much studied a difficult thing with my students, and told the important stories, but didn't get internally wiped out by them.
Time to go.
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