There’s honestly too much to share, too much breathless heartbreak in the world today, so I won’t pretend to be able to address even half. Where I find myself today is in a space to recognize the notion, if not the reality, of miscommunication, something so central to our daily ills I feel like I have to address it. It’s been my year to sit up and pay attention to this problem especially, because it’s multifaceted, and not what it looks like on the outside so often, it’s a wonder we’re all not disowning each other on a daily basis.
I know that my pitfall comes with the expectations I was brought up to have, something ingrained in me even after years of being a full-on adult, and I find this tension in the way I parent. It’s forced me to come to terms with seeing others—my children, my students—as they really are. To meet them and accept them as they are, where they are, instead of as I wish them to be. When I don’t do this, and see in my mind only my sense of who they should be, things go very poorly. Seems elementary, but honestly, it happens so much more often than I want it to, this tension between what I think life should be and what it actually is, right before me. I’m grateful my children have, in a way, forced me to sit up and pay attention to this spiritual lesson.
Now that I’m seeing it (half the battle, right?), I want to apply this in other ways, and it feels trickier. There’s moral ground that I won’t back away from, and this becomes a kind of bias, but, as I teach my students, bias is my favorite four letter word. I grin when I say this, and then ask them to consider the fact that every last person on this green earth has a bias. It’s not the bias, really. It’s how we use this, in what way we foist our bias upon others, and whether we use a bias for good or ill that makes the difference. Seeing this starts to shift things a bit. I’ve been able to carry the lesson of bias into my personal relationships and, to some degree, into the hot mess of a world we’re living in today, which is a bevy of miscommunication, and of moral testing ground. In this space I call upon the lesson—and because of my beliefs I call upon the Spirit—to see what really is, and then to act in a force of good for the world. I hope in the process I am both water and fire, both a cooling and a rising, that makes for real, sustainable change.