Weathering Today's Storms with our Life-Value




I’m going to combine the above reference to week 19 of Dear Teachers and my Verbostratis blog essay for this week, Personal and Public Ikigai in the United States, because they dovetail.

As I’ve stated before, January’s Dear Teachers essays revolve around “time”, especially “now”. Where I live, we’re expecting some winter storms over the next 48 hours, so the theme is fitting. In Marlene’s photo, her capture of the beautiful colors and textures of a summer storm rushing in reminded me that life is like that: wild stuff rolls in. We all have storms and it feels like they do so when we’re knee-deep in our “stuff”. Can we make it through them? Most likely, yes, if we have firm roots. The ways to form those roots are what I wrote about in the September-December essays.




Our roots can also be described as our ikigai- our life-value. If we’re living in our passion and in a mission, AND if we’re within a culture that allows us to do that sustainably as a profession and as a vocation, we have made it to our ikigai. We are living a life we value AND that others value. We need both.

Most of us have parts of this picture right now. In other words, we have roots, but they could be made substantially stronger. Life’s storms, whatever we decide they are, will more than likely do some damage to us in our present states.

I made a connection this week over this essay with an educator in Seoul named Matthew Boomhower, whose own special interest is global education. In his blog, he writes of his philosophy: 

“The more time I spend in the classroom, the more I come to see education as an experience in which the line between the teacher and student blurs in a community of learning.” 


In Week 19, I wrote that we can ride out the storms of life better if we do so together. All of us (all adults and children, everywhere) can reach our ikigai by doing things more in community. How we could do that is a whole other huge discussion. (Can I add here how stoked I am to combine Japanese, American and Korean references in a single essay?)

I send you sincere wishes for success in your coming week. What are your storms? What are your roots? Comment below or go tell both to a friend. Ask them of theirs. The more connections we find, the better off we’ll all be.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The End

Image
I’m going to roll the last two essays of Dear Teachers into one reflection and close this first year’s journey off. It’s the end. Or, an end. In Week 39, I wrote of the importance in seeing those tiny good things in life: life’s sweetnesses. Ends make them stand out more. There has been a ton of vitriol on social media this week. Perhaps not new, but the education community has been sucked into this phenomenon as well. Earnest people have been burned. Stances have been challenged. Flames have been fanned. You know the whole routine. Between these behaviors and my own personal struggles, I’ve been in an odd place wondering about what we (I) are doing. Then, I had a short, but surprisingly deep conversation with a clerk at a store. It really moved me. I found myself genuinely thanking him and wishing him well as we finished our business. I honestly felt a tiny moment of sweetness there that captured that wholeness and togetherness of which I’ve spoken of throughout this book
Read more

Rising Higher and Higher

Image
This week, I’m including the full essay from my book, Dear Teachers . In addition, I’m going to share a link to a beautifully written blog entry from a teacher I’ve met on Twitter, which I believe resonates with it. It’s Julia E. Torres’s An Open Heart , which talks of the need of being both true and there for all our students. The picture I used this week wasn’t the normal nature scenes. It’s a balloon, whose pattern reminded me of rainbows and seagulls, flapping across the sky. The word choices I made were influenced by BTS’s  Outro: Wings , a powerful song about hope, belief, and  the need to support each other. All my April essays focus on really seeing what is . Especially now, we may be too exhausted to see either our or our students’ progress. We may be disheartened by personal or larger-scale setbacks and feel swamped by negativity. But if we find time to look, we’ll see our balloons are still rising and we can make changes to help them rise further. There’s hop
Read more

The Heart Within

Image
I just finished writing a big essay on my main blog, called Spring and the Death of Denial . It was in response to a fantastic conversation on a philosophical radio program called On Being. Now, I’m hopping back into Dear Teachers , and am struck by how this week’s essay, the last of the April focus on what’s really there, connects to that. When we don’t want people to see who and what we really are, we throw up defenses. When we don’t trust the people that surround us, we again build barriers. Within those walls, we are one thing. Outside of those walls, we are something else. To grow, we first have to admit the walls exist within all of us. They come from our families and traditions. From our own pasts. From our own needs. From our own fears. In this week’s essay, the image from Marlene that I chose was a close-up of a lily in full bloom. The center of that flower is bright yellow, while the outer edges are a deep red, trimmed in that same golden hue. We don’t get t
Read more