Right person, right place, right time

A few years back, a friend was explaining she felt that failed relationships/colossal mistakes were sent to us by a higher power, the universe, whatever, to teach us lessons about ourselves.  Somehow this ties into experience being the greatest educator or something and I remember thinking at the time that there were a few lessons I could have skipped (very much like Christian Ethics-oh yeah, I did skip those.)

Speaking with another friend (one who is going through her own personal hell right now) at that time, we kind of agreed that we are sent the people we need at the time, we just need to be open to receiving them into our lives.

There are lessons, then there are lessons.  There are people we need, and then there are people someone ("someone" or "Someone") else thinks we need. The lessons from the universe are the ones that suck ass.   

I guess where I am is at a point where I can say that I do think we are sent who we need when we need them.  I have been lucky this year: new job, great new colleagues and a stronger friendship with former colleagues.  It is supposed to be this easy, right?

So why then, did I need those lessons sent to me:  tough job, asinine, cruel people, so much crap...well, after talking to my friend in the Big City, I think I have an answer.

She has come back into my life after a long absence-no drama, just time and distance doing their jobs, erasing the past connections.  After her own hellish year, she is getting it all together.  Enough to call me on my own shit, that is for sure! She is very in tune to what I am saying and doing, and it is unnerving.  She is making me think (the unexamined life and all that).

So, the other night, half-joking, as usual, I made a comment that I was learning so much from the work she has done, and that I was riding the coattails of her mistakes and missteps.  And that's when I realized that maybe those tough lessons sent to me, were actually situations where I was the person who was needed, and I couldn't be that unless I lived the challenges I did.  So maybe there is something to the Universe Lessons theory.

Which is not to say that she went through her challenges only to fulfill some cosmic role in my life...I think things are more interconnected, layered and mysterious than that...it is not, in fact, all about me. (Don't tell my husband, ha ha).  But it is interesting how often the right person has come into my life at the right time.  And how often, thinking about it, I have been that person.

So in discussing all this, we ended up talking about what a person brings to the table, the gifts they give, and how so many people give and give, and take care of others (my friend Hal would know the Meyers Briggs code for that!) and never let anything flow back (who has time?).  How we are robbed of learning, and gratitude and meaningful interaction with others.

Sometimes you have to sit back and relax and let someone or something be the balm you need.  The right person or experience could be there all along, and if you are not careful, you might be looking the wrong way, and miss him/her/it completely.  You get what you give, true, but you have to be open to receiving the message.

klm

Book of the Week - The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by MG Vassanji (Two time Giller winner)

Song of the Week - Ease Back - Amos Lee

The State of Things

I have found myself escaping into fiction a lot in the past few weeks.  If I actually admitted to the number of novels I have read, people would start to wonder who is looking after my kids.

Once I realized I was using the word "escape" to describe my forays into someone's else's imaginary landscape, I started wondering what I was trying to get away from.  It made me think the quote from George Eliot that I have on my FB page:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

I first saw it as the epigraph in Carol Shield's Unless, and it immediately struck a chord.  I was going through a "bump" of post partum at the time, and I really felt that quote described the way I was feeling.  Like it was all too much-so much easier to shut down, tune out.

I am not a scholar, but to me it seems Eliot was saying that we have immunized ourselves against the tiny episodes of life that are felt by the most minute elements of nature, and that if we could feel the pain of a blade of grass growing, or the simple beauty of a squirrel's heart beat we would be overcome by the grandness of it all.  If we just stopped to listen, we we would overhear something beautiful and horrible at the same time.  

So in the past few weeks, we have had bad news on so many fronts: friends overwhelmed by issues of money, custody, depression...One student with a parent who is hospitalized for mental health issues, another parent showed up today and said she and her husband were having trouble, and may not make it.  Everytime we turn around, it's something else.

I spoke with a colleague who has a family member who suffers from mental illness.  When she told me her story, I felt the same as I did when I heard all the others-the world presses in, and I have to push back or it will crush me.  Everyone is so sad.  They say they are happy with their stuff, and their kids, and their lives, but there is so much disaffectedness...

I tried to explain to my colleague that I kind of feel that people who suffer from depression, or mental illness are actually too much in touch with what is going on out there, that they have no filters-they can hear the grass grow, and the squirrel heart, and the mom who doesn't have her kids, or the child who has to watch the ambulance and police come pick up his father-they hear the pain in all these things and cannot cover their ears.  

I know that is how I felt when I had my post partum "issues" (I have a million euphemisms).  I felt filter-less, like every single thing that happened was a flaming arrow, and there was little ol' me, like a dork,  without a shield.  Luckily, now, after time and distance, and a round of filter-building Zoloft, and friends and family, I have a few defenses.

Even so, I can still catch whiffs of that crushing feeling, that overwhelmedness.   And I have to wonder what the world would be like if we all were a little more in touch with this craziness, if we reacted to the shit head on, if things would be different.  Imagine if instead of turning away from the difficulties others are facing, we really let ourselves feel.

I haven't any answers (thus the baffled).  But I do know that turning to a book (or four) by Paul Quarrington, or a lovely book set in Vancouver by Timothy Taylor, or an Annie Dillard or the odd Vanity Fair can make the real world recede a bit.  How lucky for me, that I can escape.

klm

Book of the Week - Stanley Park - Timothy Taylor

Song of the Week- Josh Radin/Patty Griffin - You Got Growin' Up to Do.

New Home

My web page will have a new home for now, here at Blogspot.  Mobile Me, while easy to use, was just too expensive for a beginner!

Not much new to talk about this week-I have added a couple of old blogs...

I have finished a story I was working on and now have two more on the go-by on the go, I mean they are percolating in my brain.  I feel like Walter Mitty sometimes, living another life besides the one everyone else sees.  If all this is going on in my head, it makes me wonder what is going on in the heads of the people around me!

Getting this blog moved over was a huge "to do" on my list.  Now I can start thinking of things to say...

Stay tuned...
klm

Song of the Week - For my kids- Breaking Free (High School Musical) and Crazy ABC's (BNL) Go ahead and laugh, but watching my kids dance and sing is hilarious.

Book of the Week - Cockroach Rawi Hage - I am amazed that such an unsympathetic pathetic main character can hold my attention.

The Thin Chalk Line - Re-post from Oct 15

I was running the loop around Wascana Park last weekend when I heard a sound that made me catch my breath. No it was not the music on my iPod that my husband hates so much, but the sound of Canada geese. Now, those who have been to Regina will not find the sound of honking geese to be out of the ordinary. But the way it sounded above the music made me stop and take my earphones out. It sounded exactly like a sound I heard while watching coverage of 9-11.

You may remember hearing a high-pitched squealing in the background of the shots of people fleeing, or wandering in a daze after the towers fell. Many reporters at the scene were talking about the car alarms that were going off. It was eventually reported that the sigh-pitched noise that underscored everything else on that horrible day was the personal alarm system that warns when a firefighter is motionless for a predetermined amount of time. That is the day I realized what the word cacophony really meant. What the sound of those alarms really meant. When I heard that noise again on Friday, it first made me remember those that died, and how possible it actually could be for those close to me. Then it made me think about how we romanticize the profession of firefighter, and of police officer, too. Which led me to think about teachers, and how unromantic that job is. (I need to point out here that I know I think too much-my mom told me so!)

I recently read a book called Working Fire - The Making of an Accidental Fireman by Zac Unger. It’s about a young, well-heeled child of Berkley professors who decides to chuck his Masters and his stimulating work watching birds mate to become an Oakland firefighter. Unger writes of the way civilians romanticize the Job. Then he goes on to describe things that I have rarely heard my dad and brother discuss-the hell of training, CPR on dead people, sitting with a woman, her legs trapped in her car, while his crew uses the Hurst tool (Unger says a fire fighter would never call them the Jaws of Life-that’s romanticizing civilian talk) to extricate her. He talks to her, all the while knowing that once they peel back the metal that is pinning her legs, she will likely bleed out before she gets to the hospital. He talks about his screw-ups, and hierarchy and AIDS and crackhouses. And yet, in the end, through all the shit, he is still a hero.

Coming from a family “steeped in the traditions” of the fire service (wow, could barely say that with a straight face), I have always been curious about what drives firefighters to choose the job, and what it’s really like on the inside. It is very hard to discuss these things with my brother and dad, because generally, what happens in the hall stays there.

I know other firefighters of course, and we all have seen TV shows and movies that portray the exciting and heroic life of a firefighter. I have a very clear memory of my dad bursting into laughter when he watched parts of the movie Backdraft-not just the pyrotechnics, but the shot of Billy Baldwin making out with his girlfriend in a bed of hoses on the back of an engine (and there is a difference between truck and engine, apparently), had my dad really rolling his eyes. But that could just be from watching a sex scene with his teenaged daughter in the room.

So talking with my dad this weekend, I wondered about the police’s thin blue line and the firefigher’s code, and why teachers are so different. Why can cops and firefighters put aside the bullshit and save the life? Why can those departments make good cases for getting budgets passed? Why do people get excited and choked up when the flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, then pass by, on the way to save the day?

I wondered if maybe it is the immediacy of the save. The imminence of the danger. And maybe the uniform. Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all saying those heroes don’t deserve honour and respect. They do. They save lives, they protect us. They put their lives on the line, and maybe that does some romanticizing.

Teachers, in my humble opinion, are mandated to save lives, too. It is like saving someone from drowning in a slow leak, rather than the flash flood. Ask any parent whose child has learning issues, or social issues...they will no doubt feel anxious immediacy - save my child - but our school systems are not set up to respond and save those lives quickly.

Lack of communication at a fire or a hostage-taking would result in inquiries and finger-pointing. Lack of communication in the education system, well, that’s par for the course...we have, after all, twelve years to get it right. Maybe.

Teamwork is crucial at an accident scene - egos aside, you do your job for the good of the person in danger. Some teachers (some!) hide themselves away, do not join the team, just put in the time, and protect their fiefdom, their domain. Their egos.

Police officers and firefighters will back each other up, sometimes blindly. What someone does to one of their own, is done to all. What if teachers backed each other the same way?

What if the result of a teacher not putting his or her all into the lives that are entrusted to us was immediately apparent-the death of self-esteem, the death of love of learning, the death of self-confidence, the death of decency. Would that move us to take our jobs as seriously as a “first responder”?

What if teachers could inspire that sense of respect, awe and gratitude? And why don’t we? What would change for us, for our students, for the future, if we did inspire those things...

Book of the Week - Working Fire by Zac Unger

City of Yes by Peter Oliva

Song of the Week - New Shoes - Paolo Nutini

A Man Can’t Lose - Paul Young

Hallelujah...

So, Facebook.
Tonight, a girl I barely remember from high school poked me. When I received it, I IM'd my hubby, telling him that this girl I didn't really like or know wanted to be my "friend". To be honest, I think I always found her to be a little weird-she walked funny, I remember, and had a strange slow way of talking.
I think a big part of my issue was that she thought I was great. Followed me around a bit, tried to fit in with the group. Tried to please me. Give me a break.
My husband of course put me in my place, telling me maybe I wasn't as great as I seemed to think I was. (Aren't you just the hot shit, is what he said).
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that back then, I didn't object to her hanging around me. It wasn't because she worshipped me and thought I was cool...I just didn't question her right to be there. It was a time in my life that I was 100% confident in who I was and where I belonged. I didn't have to worry about this so-called loser, because she wasn't one. She was just...her. Yeah, she annoyed me, but I had no reason to jockey for position, or to push her out, I was, she was, we all just were.
Things would change after I moved away, to a new school-constant push and pull for friends, can't lose my place with this friend or that. I still had "marginal" friends-geeks, potheads, gunners, speds, heads...but I sure did my best to keep them all from knowing each other. Or, from knowing that I knew them all. I was a chameleon, blending in as needed. That sucks the big one. Sadly, it took this long for me to realize...what shitty shallowness.
Even today, back at school, the teacher this time, still jockeying for position, looking for an angle to best fit in, to get what I need. There are still the "cool kids" but I think, even at 36 that the cool kids are the ones who don't give a crap. I'm working on that. Ha.
So I poked this girl back...a girl I had not thought of since I moved from that northern hinterland...but someone who, unless she was just randomly poking people from the yearbook, I obviously impressed in some way...thank goodness we grow up a little bit. A little bit.