Something is happening lately in my life that is making stories all around me seem bigger than ever. 'I have always felt that life is a story...'....yes, I love that line. But now, it's more. More about God and His work, more about the world seen from many angles. Less about my own part of it.
This story is worth telling.
'What is the shape of my life?' is a question I like to ask myself every once in a while. It's good medicine to ask that question. For me now, life is teaching by day and wondering about writing in every other waking hour. What's next? How should it be considered? Better yet, how should it be lived? These questions are loud, like a song playing on high volume that will not be turned down.
There are more questions. Why, anyway? What do you want from this way of life? Are you the dreamiest someone you know, and awkwardly, simultaneously, the most practical on the outside in order to defend this? Is this ok? Big questions, all.
Words and books and people and how they intersect are the things that get me excited in the morning. For me, fascinating life is always written in stories.
But I think it is not about book tours or fame or the like. On some level, sure, of course, but bigger always and much more organic and authentic and scary is the fact that I've always wanted this. I always wanted to be a writer of books.
Even through college, celebrity status was always first awarded to those who had written things and somehow made them into books. Donald Miller came to speak once, and I just sat there and wondered about all of the amazing conversations he'd had with people about his books. Probably in reality, these 'magical conversations' with editors were frustrating and defeating. Furthermore, and about this time, learning that a book could be absolutely terrible was news to me, and an important distinction to make in seeing the world as things really are. It took me until college to understand that? But bright and shiny and first is the charm of the author.
When I was in elementary school and the teacher read stories, I never listened that closely to what she was saying. I tried, but Life even then, in addition to books, was the study of classrooms. Instead of predicting the plot, I predicted, with sidelong glances, the reactions of my classmates. I noticed little plot, but instead the teacher's voice and how it moved the story.
I wondered how she knew to capture us so well. And sometimes at home, I would practice reading books to a class full of imaginary children, holding the book like my teacher. I used to think it meant that I wanted to teach 1st grade. Now I can see it was about presenting the book. Thankfully, so so thankfully, I realized what a royal mistake it would be for someone like me to teach 1st grade. I would be brittle by now. So wrong. So fake. A hot mess on the inside, laminating things and color-coordinating things with no splendor, and somehow, somehow, finding a way to teach kids to read. Believe me, with subbing, I got drop kicked into many a classroom. I've done it, and sat there in silent horror thinking, 'Wow, I really could do this for 30 years. But I'd always smile weird. And I would be dying.'
Teaching 1st grade did not make me or the world around me artful in any way. I saw that people do things like this all of the time, but I just couldn't. Meanwhile, I lived amidst the artful 1st grade teachers who really did know their purpose and their call. In subbing, God's little trick to wreck and then reconstruct me, I could see what I was really good at, what was as natural to me as breathing. Other times, I could see what made me feel that I was pitching over a cliff.
That's 1st grade, in all of its 'everything around me is laminated' glory.
Put plainly, it's this. I should not teach 1st grade. I should teach 7th and 8th. Good thing, great thing, that in my 20s, I figured out both subtle and enormous things about my world. Now, as the teacher herself, I can see that the teacher's perspective isn't always built into the reading. The art is reading the crowd. The art is also found in the books I read to them, ones which were written a long time ago, in another era in history.
That's the sweet spot.
I've been teaching Progressivism lately at school, and I can tell that it wears well because while it's heavy and entrenched in the suffering of the tenement's poor, there are people in that time in history going after stories. They're writing articles, published books, drafting amendments. The written word painted onto signs alone pointed to the surge of public outcry in our major cities. It rings true...in the often unavoidable muck of life, I am comfortable with the muckrakers.
I'm beginning to see that I'm not just talking about writing like a writer, but owning and embodying life like one too.
Some, like William Hazlitt and Brenda Ueland, suggest rambling walks before dinner. Others, lots of smoking and ruthless crazy-eyed thoughts that force you to see the world as the best and awfulest thing. Some things are really destructive, but half of their art is coping too. In reading about some of these people, I could see what tortured artist really means.
Clickety clack goes the typewriter in my mind, and the words emerge, and I absolutely cannot wait to find paper. Not because it's the next great American novel, but because I'm just compelled to. It's the thing I can't not do.
And what is that inspiring line from 'Chariots of Fire?'
'When I run I feel God's pleasure?'
Oh yes. That.
Insert 'write',
And I relate.
I am a writer. I am a writer. I am a writer.
I'm writing about these traits to remind myself that these things are true.
You'd think this much talk would make you own it, but that's the façade you show to convince yourself you're legitimate too. We're glorious ruins, but we wonder about ourselves, sometimes too much. There is more to see here, more than our own silly questions about who God made us to be. My grandma refers to me as 'the writer' in the small town where she's lived for over 60 years, and when people ask her about her world and her day, my name comes up, and I'm called 'the writer', like I have something bit that they are waiting to hear. This is hard to absorb because authorship, this writing life, feels too wonderful to be true. Isn't that why I started this blog at all? It is. I had to convince myself to write, every day, something little and big and true. Because I couldn't not, and it was hiding too much to do otherwise. And since that time, it's been the slow arrival of understanding on many levels.
That I'm not just a teacher or an external processor or a social butterfly.
That instead sometimes my life is quiet and slow.
Sometimes what is life giving can be so scary.
And sometimes you don't think what you say counts, and then someone tells you that it does. And the world shifts a little right there.
I wonder sometimes if I'm good at telling stories. This thing I long for....is it there at all in me every day? Other times I've known I am and so 'what next?' is to anchor myself to the right things, so that the story doesn't become only misplaced. Or worse yet, just about me. There is too much humanity in front of me to just write about one story, one lifetime, one thing. And so at this point in life, I'm more interested in what lives around me. I want to go out and see about things. To pay attention and listen better than ever before.
We are always being told to listen more, and I think this is pointing to something big that people often miss. I'm listening, friend, and the world is opening up incredibly.
Yesterday I went, deliberately and resolvedly, to a place I'd been to only once before. A little shop nestled into a part of the city I really like. I did this in order to be kind to myself. Just once before, I went there on a date. And while it was strange and tragic for a few seconds to go back to it, it was mostly very good and happy. (It is still as lovely as it ever was.) While I was there, I listened for things.
I listened and I watched, but casually, so as not to seem like the I was the creepiest. I watched people walk by and thought about their world and prayed for them. I relished being anonymous once more. Best discovery about self in 2014 so far....in my busy very known teaching world, being anonymous about once a week is an absolute must. I think this follows years and years of living in the same town with all of my students and being way more stressed out about encountering them than I ever let on.
In general, coffee shop or otherwise, one very kind thing I've done for myself is to slow down. Hello, Millennial world, you need this. I, in this caught up busy place, need this. Everyone talks about it, but do they actually live it? (That's the clincher right there.) You can see it in their eyes, if they really do slow down and live it out, can't you? (I think so too.)
I've stopped watching almost all television in the last few months, inspired by hipsters and pseudo-hipsters alike to actually take it out of the living room at all. (Is admitting that here making me one too?? I can't tell.) I'm not missing most things, and I feel like the simple person I always want to be in an oversaturated world. And when the snarling question of 'What if that means your not enough or you're not catching it all?' comes through, I remind my inner critic that I was never meant to. And I breathe easy once more.
For the writing life....
More walking, more early morning grace and kindness and hot coffee, more gazing happily out of windows.
So much less of the television, the oversaturated 'must know everything' teaching life. Less angst for sure about the gray areas of life, which have, in the last few years, so entangled me and dragged me down.
So that's a start.
I see my life plainly, and it is a good one. It is humble and small and just a few simple things. Not because of a lot of what I've done, or any accolade I could claim for myself, but because of Jesus. He makes me new. He brings me to each new place.
This new season of my own life is an exciting one. It's one that is collecting all kinds of connections from my past and adding to the present. I'm wide-eyed grateful and only know the next step in front of me. But that feels like enough. If I were to take along with me the words of another, to really explain all of what I have just said, it would be simple. It would be Mary Oliver. And it would be this....
'Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.'
No comments:
Post a Comment