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The Tragic Gap

Parker J. Palmer uses a phrase on his website for the Center for Courage and Renewal: the tragic gap.  He says the challenge is to figure out out how to have courage while we stand in this "tragic gap...between different realities of life and the knowledge of what is possible."  When our emotional resources are all used up, or worse yet robbed of us, the courage to stand in this gap has a hard time even making gasps to help us know that courage needs emergency help.  

Here are a tragic gap I've witnessed this week:

My dear colleague reported a Twitter feed devoted to hate at our school.  The Twitter account had cropped up in response to one a student made to offer anonymous compliments to others.  The words in the hate account were horrible, energy sapping words by anonymous students who, tragically, had never learned to trust kindness.  When my friend reported the account, the principal was business-like, letting her know what she could do about it: very little.  It turns out that when students post about other students outside of school hours, the school has no recourse.  Like a lot of things that lead to brokenness, that rule makes perfect legal sense and not one iota of human sense.  My fellow teacher pushed harder.  Within a short time, one of our assistant principals came to her door, pulled her out of class, and told her, "You need to stop pushing people about this or you are going to make a lot of people mad at you."  The reality is the assistant principal, like all of them, is overworked and pulled in far too many directions in a day.  The reality is the pushing caused everyone to feel helpless against the county regulation.  The reality is things like this will always exist.  

And yet... It is possible to fight it without breaking the rule.  It is possible to choose a voice of leadership to speak out against it with compassion and patience.  

It hurts to inhabit this tragic gap because we know what CAN be if someone finds a way to set aside all the other distractions and fight hate with love.  

So many teachers leave our ranks every year.  We could say it is the pay and just stop talking, knowing that particular battle is far bigger than any one of us.  But the truth is that there are plenty of paychecks in teaching if we can hold on, if we can keep the courage growing, if we can inhabit this tragic gap, look the pain in the eye, and grow in areas where we feel equipped.

I can stand in this tragic gap all day if I have a trust circle of peers around me who hold shoulders with me as we push forward against the external pressures toward what we know is possible.

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