It’s Not Easy Being God
Creating the entire universe was easy, simple even, when you’re all powerful. When you’re God. Bringing together all from nothing, or something. or self (depending on who you side with), and putting everything that is into a swirling cacophony for your pleasure, is an afterthought compared to what comes next: being accepted.
It is not easy being God. The profound sense of separation anxiety that permeates every interaction will sag the strongest, broadest shoulders. Reaching out to creatures so far below your very ontological self, only to have your hand slapped away by an upraised finger or chin.
Knowing that your love sustains their ability to hate you, or worse, pretend you don’t exist. Being the ugly girl in class, the wall flower no one asks to dance, the one whose hair and glasses will never be let down by a Hollywood cliché. At least not in time.
Creation is easy, compared to dealing with creatures. Who would have thought drawing the planets into alignment would be easier than drawing all creation onto one’s self?
(re)defintion
I’m sitting in a chair in Nease Library. Second floor. Between the second set of stacks after the common area, on the left. Next the window. Facing Spinoza, Leibnitz, James, and the rest. Books as familiar as family. Maybe more so. Smells that transport me to this place a decade ago, writing papers, conducting research, composing poetry and song, love letters and harsh dismissals. Occasionally studying. Defining myself and my world.
Feels like home.
In educational theory we talk about multimodal education: information being transmitted via different avenues, working upon the different senses to aid in comprehension. Reading the text with a detailed diagram. Hearing a lecture while a demonstration is taking place. It is based on research into how memory is created, stored and retrieved. It explains why we have to turn the radio down and tell the kids to shut up in the back seat when we become lost while driving. It is the reason why we walk back into the room we had a thought that we forgot when we exited. Our brains store things stronger with multiple points of association.
This desk and seat may or may not be the same I sat in for years: they may have been switched, moved, replaced. But for some reason, that doesn’t matter. I sit down and I am not here, I am then. Not remembering, being. Living in the moments which are apparently ever present. These stains and scratches may not be mine, but they are. Every one.
The more you repeat an action, the more you return to a place, the more it is a part of who you are. For good or bad. Thus, we are where we go, where we return to, and where we remain. Blemishes and all, they define us. For good or bad.
Scattered Thought
. . .“taste and see” implies my love must be earned . . .
Classroom Management 101
“I don’t even know what I believe anymore!” ~ StudentGood. My work here has just begun.
———————–
The purpose of teaching is to communicate knowledge. To pass information back and forth, in the hopes that it will change the world. I teach college students to be teachers, and currently that means fighting to make them understand, beyond a Hallmark card awareness, that they really are changing the world.
So I ask questions. Hard questions. And don’t relent.
So your view of humanity is that everyone is utterly selfish and lazy, and will not do anything unless manipulated, rewarded, or punished into compliance? Then why do you feel that any one of your future students would want to be in school or believe you when you tell them what you’re offering has value? Why should they care about it when they figure out, later in life, no one is going to give them a sticker or a piece of candy to do what they were supposed to do? Don’t sit there silent: answer me.
Propose situations with a razor edge, and expect them to dance.
Garden of Eden: God allowing “natural consequences”, employing “punishments” or is this a case of “logical consequences”?
Or fall.
Taking an eight year old to the social worker, after learning she’s been molested, is easy. You get to pass the responsibility. What will you do for her when she returns to class the next day?
Hard.
Anyone?
——————
I’m a big meany: I push and push and push to make my students wonder what it is they believe, and why they do the things that they do. How many of the previous plans for their future students are actually based on something other than re-packaged events from their childhood, bad teacher movies, and their need to be loved by someone to feel a hole in their lives. Repeated action does not mean good practice. Ask an abused wife, or her daughter looking for a spouse years later.
Open up to your excerpt from The Prince. Now, would you rather be feared or loved by your students: you can only choose one or the other. Go.
It’s amazing what people say when you force them to think about their own thinking, alone, then in the presence of others.
Did it ever occur to you that your mother was wrong in the way she handled that?
—————————-
When they arrive at the place of saying, I don’t know what I think, I’ve learned the most important thing: they’re trying. They’re thinking. The good, pat, Christian, Chicken Soup answers have melted away and they are wrestling with their own hearts.
Do you follow the “lifestyle covenant” when you don’t agree with parts of it because you are a part of the community, or because you’re afraid of the consequences?
It’s never boring at that point.
For that matter, why do you follow/worship/serve God when it’s not easy? Because you’re afraid of what will happen to you if you don’t?
————————————————
Be honest. Seriously, be honest. What do you think?
A Promise (maybe)
I’m a writer. Or at least that’s what it says inside my underwear.
Sartre, who is not the father of existentialism, talks about “bad faith”, about going through the motions that a the definition of a thing. About conforming to an image, a list, a set of principles inauthentically, unauthentically, non-authentically. Something like that. In short, “I am, because that’s what the list says I am.” Fitting in, instead of creating self. And gross oversimplification though this may be, in the end he says this is bad.
But what is a writer who doesn’t write?
Jeanine Hathaway wrote in her wonderful book Motherhouse “I feel the least whole when I couldn’t create, that is, I cannot image anything being different.”
I’m not whole.
Taking a page from the mouth of babes, or at least a former student, I will write, something, everyday.
I don’t promise it will be as profound as other things I have posted in the past, or even intelligible at times, but it will be something. The world does not revolve around Facebook notes.
Maybe an entry will only reflect on the boy who stood, alone, in chapel, whenever the Bible is read. But that will be enough.
I can imagine things being different.
And will, once again.
I am a writer, as more than my inseam will know.