Undivided Self

Palmer describes two teachers, one who found joy and success in his career, and another who did not.  He attributed the joyful teacher's success to the idea that he taught "from an undivided self."  He says, "In the undivided self, every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that it can hold students and subject as well as self."  The other teacher, on the other hand, projected his inner warfare onto his students.  The joyful teacher enjoyed craft, while the sour teacher enjoyed nothing.  The joyful teacher was "enlarged" by his teaching.  The sour teacher was diminished.

As teachers we are either the joyful teacher OR the sour teacher.  We have days, maybe even weeks, of being the joyful teacher and days of being the sour one.  In my personal experience, when I am actually in the room teaching students I am the joyful one 95% of the time.  When I leave the room and enter the rest of the realm of my career my joy sometimes fails.  Too many days in a row of the diminished joy and I feel the job as a drain.

In my joyful days I feel like there are far more deposits than withdrawals; I can see the beauty in having a job that allows me to be creative and strategic; I can appreciate the relationships I get to build with students.  I am undivided.  My quilting brings art; my reading brings wisdom; my family life brings love.

In my low morale moments, though, all I can see are the withdrawals.  I may have just had a wonderful time teaching, but as soon as the kids leave the room I am tense and agitated.  My quilting is neglected; my reading is perfunctory; my family life is an obligation on the list.

I'm working on trying to figure out what specifically are the things that turn the tide.  What happens that throws me into a place where I am trying to behave as something other than my true self?  

Here are some possibilities:

1. I love feeling success in my job.  Listening to people complain for the sake of complaining, rather than for the sake of growth, makes me feel helpless. I absorb their energy, rather than see it and brush it aside.  The relationships that are based only on one person needing to complain do not bring me life.  I try to bring life to those relationships, but in many cases the other person is not interested in being anything other than what they are, too.

2.  When the number of papers I have to grade or the number of meetings I have or the number of items on my list seem to never decrease, I withdraw from creating relationships with students because I believe I won't later have the bandwidth to maintain those relationships.  I don't want to be that person who is connected and close today, but then later has to push people away.

3.    When people abuse their power by hurting others with less power.  I feel helpless and bitter when I see a teacher bully a child or an administrator suck the life and joy out of a colleague or a county leader overtax a principal.  

 I'm wondering if these possibilities have some common factor, and the only one I can see quite clearly is helplessness.  I despise feeling powerless.  And if I examine my post from yesterday I can see that also hate APPEARING helpless.  

I wonder if I can make peace with that.