To All the Teachers-
Earlier this week, many across our country honored and celebrated “Teacher Appreciation Week.” I have been blessed with many great teachers, in academia and in life. Teachers and teacher’s aids are the heartbeat of our educational system. Without many of them, I would not be who or where I am today; a few weeks away from graduating with a second master’s degree, the love of reading both fiction and nonfiction and an endless thirst for learning. As a young kid, I was bounced back and forth between the “traditional” classroom and the “remedial” classroom; not quite fast enough to keep up in the traditional but the remedial was not challenging enough…I had trouble figuring out where I belonged. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in high school that a science teacher approached my parents and suggested formal testing to see if there was a learning disability. My entire world changed after that, I finally got the much needed support to increase my chances of doing better in school.
Outside of formal educational settings, there too, teachers can be found- parents, coaches, mentors, friends, strangers on the street. They are all around us. At the closing of each therapy session, my therapist invites me to choose a reading from a variety of books or cards from authors such as Melody Beattie, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Pema Chödrön. This week I happen to choose Pema’s Pocket book and randomly opened the book to page 5:
Life is a good teacher
LIFE is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in
transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself
up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, inbetween
state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we
don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond
limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of
affairs.
While this passage will speak differently to each of us, in that moment, it confirmed everything I had been talking about in that session. As I said early, I am just a few weeks away from graduation and my mind has been consumed by the idea of life transitions. Sometimes my mind feels like a ferris wheel in which each bucket is a different thought and when the wheel comes to a stop, whichever bucket is on top is the thought that takes hold for a period of time. Eventually the wheel begins to move again and maybe a new thought will take hold and often times, thoughts take hold multiple times. Sharing a few examples of thoughts: what job will I land and when, I’ll miss seeing some of my closest classmates/friends on a weekly basis, or how do I balance the needs and wants in my life.
This is one of my favorite nature pictures I have taken. I was on a catamaran with my parents while on vacation in Camden, ME. It reminds me of the quote, “There are no lines in nature, only lines of colour, one against the other.”- Edouard Manet. Nature is one of two places that nearly helps to slow down the ferris wheel of my thoughts. Connecting with nature, whether it is bare feet on the sand, rolling a pine cone in my hands so I can take in the scent and residue or sitting on a rock watching the sunset or the moonrise, helps to settle the mind and calm the nervous system. My second go-to place is my meditation cushion. Having a daily-ish shamatha practice provides opportunity to stabilize my mind by cultivating awareness. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when my mind feels like a race car circling laps. But more often then not, sitting on the cushion for 5, 10 or 60 minutes at a time has helped me work with discursive thoughts, tap into emotions (good, bad and indifferent), and become more friendly toward myself. Nature and meditation are two teachers whom I rely on on a regular basis.
There are many people in my life I owe a great deal of gratitude to and for; I have learned wonderful lessons from all of those around me. And I am learning how to give myself a bit of grace as I continue to learn more about who I am and who I want to be in this world. After all, I could be my own greatest teacher.
