Next Step Forward

How’s life, NIP?
 

            I’ve been thinking about the big picture a lot lately. It seems as if every few years I get into a groove where I spend several months really reflecting upon what has transpired in my life over a chunk of 3-5 years. When I began this blog back in 2010, it was at a point in my life during which the past year had been one of big change in my professional life. I had recently left the English department at school and taken on a new challenge by moving to Social Studies. Having multiple degrees that qualify me for either of these fields, I leapt at the chance to change. Sometimes people fear change, but I’ve come to a point in my life that I realize that change is necessary for us to maximize our potential. These changes usually coincide with a good hard look at our recent past along with the realization that we’re on the verge of one of two options: stagnate or take the next step forward.

            I never realized it when I was young, but I did this almost accidentally every few years. I don’t think I had the wisdom (read: life experience) to know that what I was doing was reflecting on how I had gotten to a particular point in my life or, more importantly, where to go. I would simply let life take me where it wanted, and that has had its advantages to some degree. Now I’m old enough to recognize that it takes a balanced approach to both letting life lay lots of options at your feet and then selecting one path to travel for a while, to try it out and see if it’s best for you and where you are in life, if you will. Many people are afraid to do this, NIP, but what I’ve discovered is that very often you either: 1) realize soon enough that this path wasn’t suited for you and can quickly reverse course; 2) find that life will lay another option along the line that allows you to correct course while still moving forward. I’ve grown to enjoy the second option more than the first as I’ve gotten older, mainly because I still feel as if I am progressing in one sense or another. Either way, you’ve got to trust yourself and your capacity to grow as a person and, more importantly, persevere through minor setbacks.

            This can easily be explained by my own experience of the last half of my life (about 19 years at this point). As I said earlier, I never realized I reflected this way when I was younger. I only really started to notice and to do so with purpose once I got into my 30s. When I was 21, for instance, I thought back to the time when I was 16 or 17 and told myself, “Man, have I grown up since then. I know so much more than I did 5 years ago.” Then, 25 rolled around and I started to think, “Boy was I a fool for thinking I knew anything at 21.” 30 comes around the bend, I met Erin, and life really began to get great, but I couldn’t help shake the feeling that though I had learned so much throughout my 20s, much of my earlier reflections had been tainted with hubris. Rather than thinking I knew a lot, my 30s brought me humility and made me realize that I know very, very little. Since that time it has been a continual effort to cultivate this wisdom—real wisdom—and I finally understand what Socrates meant when he famously quipped, “I know nothing.” And though I may know nothing in a deeply philosophical sense, I have a modicum of knowledge that has helped me grow a great deal as a person in many ways. With only a few months until I turn 38, I’ve been reflecting much about the last 5 years, but it’s different in that there is a deliberateness, a purpose behind the reflection. Perhaps this is simply an outgrowth of the recognition of my mortality and that I can no longer squander any of the time I have been allotted with the precious gift of life I have been given. I must use what I have left to the best of my ability both for myself but more importantly for others.

            Looking back over the last 5 years or so, I’ve had a lot of growth, a lot of progress, but I look forward to my immediate horizons because I feel there is so much more to come. Crazy as it sounds, I feel as if the last 5 years have only been the stabilization of my foundation, that now the real work will begin. What that work is I can’t quite put into words. Going back to one of the earliest metaphors I had used in the first letters, I am carving my magnum opus, creating my own work of art with my life—as we all must do, NIP—and for the first time it seems as if my sculpture is beginning to take shape. It has a rough outline rather than just being an amorphous piece of stone. All I know is that I must continue to move forward, to take that next step that will lead to the best of who I am to become. That’s all any of us can ever do, really. Reflection helps us see where we’ve been and how our past has shaped us, but these are not necessarily determinants of our future. With our past in mind we can learn to make better choices for our future. As I often tell my students in class, the best way to take care of the future is by making positive, productive choices in the present. In so doing, the future often has a way of taking care of itself. The path seems to widen in a sense, and all we must do is keep taking that next step forward. There is no going back in life. None of us are getting younger. All we can do is make the most of what we have left, regardless of what we have done.

            Something big is coming, I can feel it in my bones. Just as I could sense it when I was turning 33, I feel as if life is going to hand me a new opportunity, a new challenge. I don’t know exactly how, when, or why, but I’ve grown wise enough to embrace it when it arrives. I don’t remember who said it, but a great quote says something along the lines of “the ignorant fear change, while the wise savor it.” We can’t stop life, NIP, and it is foolish to resist change. If we’re willing to play our part and give any new endeavor our best efforts, I’ve learned that life has a way of working out for the best, even though certain moments may not seem as if it’s going that way. We must be ready for change, but not have an expectation of what that change will be. Be open to it, be balanced in accepting it, and most crucially, be grateful for it. Change is more a friend than an enemy. Resisting it only keeps us mired and leads to stagnation. Instead, take some time to seriously reflect on your life’s work, what you’ve accomplished up to this point in your life. What needs to change? How can you be better? How will you use this reflection to move onward in the right direction? I can’t answer these questions for you, but it’s important that you ask yourself them from time to time and reevaluate where you are and where to you need to go. There’s no looking back…life only moves in one direction.

Keep stepping forward, NIP.

- Ryan

P.S. - My apologies if this letter seems like a jumbled mess. It was pounded out with heart and haste. I do hope you are well and I thank you for reading.

On Patience

How have you been, NIP?

            I know that is has been quite some time since I’ve written a letter to you, and I hope your life has been going well since we last communicated. It’s been a tough year for me personally, but I’m managing it fairly well thanks to cultivating a better disposition through these five qualities that I’ve been writing about over the last several letters. It’s fitting the final letter on the five qualities concerns patience, mainly because I’ve had to exercise my own a great deal during the preceding months. And while it’s much easier for me to do at this point in my life, this certainly wasn’t the case when I was young. I don’t know if it’s due to me closing in on 40 years old as my wonderful wife Erin likes to remind me from time to time, or simply because I focus on patience so much as one of the five qualities that I needed to work on in order to become a better person. Heck, it could be a combination of both for all I know. No matter the reason, I feel like a much better husband, son, brother, friend, and teacher due to my increased patience.

            Out of any of the five qualities of love, compassion, gratitude, generosity, and patience, it is patience that is perhaps the most difficult to practice in contemporary society. In developed countries such as the U.S.—and perhaps every other Western developed nation—most people have certain expectations about how life should be lived, and very often these expectations are intertwined with a sense of immediacy or urgency. And though our breakneck-speed paced culture often saddles us with a sense of entitlement with regard to getting what we want when we want it, I’ve discovered in the last few years that the things that really matter—the goals that are really worth working toward—don’t coincide with haste. More often than not, the things we really want to accomplish in life take a great deal of time and need to flower in their own way, which is precisely why patience must be practiced in every type of personal growth endeavor. Whether you are trying to lose weight/live a healthier lifestyle, overcome an addiction, or simply improve your overall disposition, NIP, you must begin walking the path with the understanding that what you most want to accomplish with the remainder of your life will take time, perhaps lots of it.

            While I’m sure we all have differing definitions of patience and what it is/how it works, I wanted to share this short excerpt from an article I had read recently by Norman Fischer, a Zen roshi (teacher) whose new book Training in Compassion I am looking forward to reading. Here’s what he has to say on patience:

Patience is the capacity to welcome difficulty when it comes, with a spirit of strength, endurance, forbearance, and dignity rather than fear, anxiety, and avoidance. None of us likes to be oppressed or defeated, yet if we can endure oppression and defeat with strength, without whining, we are ennobled by it. Patience makes this possible. In our culture, we think of patience as passive and unglamorous; other qualities like love or compassion or insight are much more popular. But when tough times cause our love to fray into annoyance, our compassion to be overwhelmed by fear, and our insight to evaporate, then patience begins to make sense. To me it is the most substantial, most serviceable, and most reliable of all spiritual qualities. Without it, all other qualities are shaky.

When I read this part of the article, it made so much sense to me as I reflected upon the five qualities that I have been trying to improve in myself over the last four years. Though I do think that all five of them are in some sense an extrapolation of the first quality, love, I feel as if patience is the glue that binds them all together. The five qualities, to me, are not so much a linear progression but a circle, each one building off of the others. This past week in my World Religions class at school, in fact, we studied a major, basic tenet of Buddhism, the Eightfold Path. After listing out the eight steps, I cautioned the students not to think of them as individual rungs on a ladder, but as the spokes of a wheel attached to a central hub. All of them are necessary complements to each other; to remove a spoke would mean the wheel becomes unbalanced and prone to failure. It is the same for the five qualities in that the removal of patience would make the entire edifice come crashing down.

            When it comes to the actual practicing of patience, we must begin with ourselves. Much in the same way that we find it impossible to love others if we cannot love ourselves, if we cannot be patient with ourselves our dreams will never come to fruition. If you really want to get better at anything, overcome any obstacle, you must begin by being honest with yourself. Our life’s work of trying to become the best human being we are capable of becoming will not happen overnight. It will take our entire lifetime to achieve, and we must walk the path with integrity and patience. Life will challenge us all and be extremely frustrating at times, but those are the moments in which we most need patience in order to be resilient. I have made many strides in my own personal cultivation of patience, but I am smiling and shaking my head as I type these words knowing how much more work I have to do in this regard. To be fair, the responsibility we have to live the best life possible requires us to be patient with ourselves and others. Letting life blossom before us is much more rewarding than trying to act too quickly or taking on more than we can handle; the latter only leaves us stressed and disappointed, whereas the former is full of simple surprises.

            Many years ago, I taught English before becoming a Social Studies teacher. During my days of reading literature with young people, I grew rather enamored with a short story/essay by a famous Hispanic author, Rudolfo Anaya. The story is called “A Celebration of Grandfathers” and is a moving tale about the cultural changes that take place between generations. He is a small boy who used to help his grandfather, a farmer, work his land. I still read this story to my students due to its connections with culture, a major topic we study in AP Human Geography. And while there are many reasons why I love this short narrative, there are two lines in particular that I always think about (especially now that Erin and I are learning Spanish together): the first is Ten Paciencia, which means “Have patience”; the other is terse yet powerful—“know where you stand.” So I leave these two lines to you, Nobody in Particular. Know where you stand in relation to your life. What is it that you most need to work on? What is it that you would most like to accomplish with the rest of this incredible gift of life that you have been given? No matter what the answer is to any of these questions, always balance it with his grandfather’s command to “have patience.”

Ten paciencia, NIP.

- Ryan   

On Generosity

Dear Nobody in Particular,

            Happy New Year! I hope that your 2013 is off to a great start and that you enjoyed the holiday season with your family and friends. I’m sorry for the long hiatus in writing any letters to you; the holidays were busy and then getting back to school / preparing my students for their exams ate up what little free time that I had. Time, though, is what I’d like to address in this letter. As mentioned in previous letters, time is the most precious resource we have; we must use it mindfully in order not to squander it, especially in light of the fact that we have no idea how much we have exactly. Some people might not see the direct connection between time and generosity, but it’s there and the more cognizant we are of this relation the more wisely we use our time and the more generous we become.

            Many people might hear the words generous or generosity and automatically correlate these concepts to finance. When we think of helping others, for instance, many may think of donating money to a cause, a person, or the like. And while this is one way that we can be generous with others, financial generosity in some sense requires the least of us. True, we may have to work long hours to have earned that money, but those contributions are quickly forgotten once they’ve been made. I’m not trying to dissuade you from being generous with your money if you can afford to help others, NIP, just that the generosity stemming from money is ephemeral at best. I would argue that how we are generous with our time can be much more meaningful and lasting, but many are not willing to part with their time and offer money instead, hoping to make some beneficial impact on another’s life.

            I honestly believe time is more important precisely because it requires effort for us to be generous with it. The effort is not so much in the time spent as it is in the way we spend it. Far too often people say they want to be generous with their time with others but never really show up. True, they may be there bodily, but they’re not present. Has this ever happened to you? A friend perhaps asks to spend time with you, but instead spends most of his/her (and your) time checking the phone. I know it’s happened to me, which is precisely why I think how we are truly generous with our time is when we are fully present for that other person. Sometimes all a person needs is another attentive human being with a listening ear. One of the best compliments I’ve ever received from students is that when I listen to them speak, I listen. Recently one of my philosophy students told me that I am like no other teacher in that whatever another student wants to share with me I am genuinely interested in, whether it is about the student’s troubles in another course, how s/he passed a particular test, or the new family puppy. Regardless of what is being shared, I feel the best way any of us can be generous with our time is by purely being fully present with that person, thereby donating our time in a meaningful yet simple way.

            If I have models for generosity that I try my best to live up to in this regard, it would be my Uncle Vinnie and Aunt Nancy. In fact, they may be the ultimate example for all of the five qualities of love, compassion, gratitude, generosity and patience. Whether they realize it or not, I would be willing to wager that they have inspired all of the members of my family on my mother’s side. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of them, often reminding myself that I have so much work to do to become a better person. What they have done over the last dozen years is nothing short of miraculous and a testament to the five central qualities that I have been actively trying to cultivate myself over the last four years. What they did is adopt a baby. Abby was about 2 years old at the time they took over her foster care, and she had many, many health challenges due to her being born prematurely to a mother who was a drug addict. Her health challenges were so severe that several doctors’ prognosis concurred on one central point—Abby would live until about 5 years old at best. Through the years, Uncle Vinnie and Aunt Nancy showered this special little girl with their generosity in terms of getting her the best health care possible; perhaps more importantly, though, is how they are a constant presence in her life. Abby is now 14, a miracle by anyone’s standards. This is not to say the journey through the years has not been without challenges, but I sincerely believe that the constant source of love being given to her from the both of them has sustained and nurtured Abby.

            Regardless of which of the five qualities you choose, they are all various manifestations of love. Generosity is no different. When we choose to give/share what we have with others, the motivation is love. And while money can help those in need from time to time, what most people sorely need is not something that can be bought—it’s time. The time we take out of our busy, hectic lives to sit and share our lives with another person who is in need of a listening ear, a few words of encouragement, or solidarity shared in silence can make all the difference to that individual. If I have any words of closing for you, NIP, they would be to be generous with your time; perhaps more importantly, when you’re being generous with your time, really bring your whole being to that moment. Don’t worry about your phone, the television, or any of the myriad distractions the world is constantly laying at your feet. Just simply give someone your undivided attention for however long he/she needs it. Though it may be cliché, the best present we can give to others is our presence itself.

Who needs your generosity, NIP? Give it freely and often.

- Ryan

All I Want for Christmas

Dearest NIP,
 

            Today’s letter really isn’t a letter at all. Rather, it’s a short essay that I wrote about 3 years ago after the events mentioned within transpired. I intended it to be read to my AP Human Geography class, but the sentiment is one in which anyone can share. I hope that you and yours have a wonderful holiday season, whether you celebrated Hanukkah earlier this month, are celebrating Christmas today and tomorrow, or the New Year next week. May each of these special days remind you of what’s truly important in your life. I hope to continue with the thematic letters on the five qualities soon.

Happy Holidays,

- Ryan

*****

I want to tell you about a boy named Jonathan. Jonathan is the five year old son of two migrant workers and is the oldest of four children. When he joined Erin’s kindergarten class, it was his first exposure to school and he began more than a month late. He came to her speaking no English and, surprisingly, little Spanish. Salimar, another of Erin’s students, would often try to act as a translator for Erin, but Jonathan just stared at them when they would try to talk with him. Over the past few months, though, he slowly made gains as Erin worked closely by his side. About two months after his arrival, the word “apple” came from Jonathan’s lips along with a huge smile. Shortly thereafter, he could say “yellow,” which is apparently his favorite color.

            About two weeks ago, Jonathan stopped coming to school. By the end of the first week, Erin came home with tears welling in her eyes because she was afraid of what might have happened to him. She wondered whether or not he had enough to eat; she told me that before the school had placed him in the free and reduced lunch program, he would come to school with an ear of raw corn for lunch, undoubtedly food that had been given to his parents in lieu of cash for their labor. An entire second week had almost passed when he finally appeared alongside his mother last Friday. She explained and apologized in broken English for Jonathan’s absence; she had recently given birth to his baby brother and, coupled with not finding any work, the circumstances had forced her, her husband and the rest of Jonathan’s family to move in with relatives in Ruskin. Before leaving, Erin asked for the address so that we could bring his Christmas gifts to his new home; he was the child Erin and I specifically adopted to shower with gifts, especially educational toys that would help him continue to learn English.

            This past Saturday, Erin and I packed Jonathan’s wrapped gifts into our trunk and made the drive to Ruskin. When we found the address, we turned into a large trailer park that was clearly home to only migrant workers. Driving through the park, my eyes caught sight of a dilapidated swing set that sat barren and lifeless with only one chain hanging from the bar that playfully jostled in the wind. It only got worse. As we neared Jonathan’s trailer, his mother emerged from the doorway onto the wooden and weatherworn ramshackle steps with the newborn in her arms. She waved to us as we pulled up alongside their home. I got the presents from the trunk and as we proceeded up the steps the rest of the children gathered about the mother excitedly. Jonathan beamed with his characteristic smile, the same one Erin had described to me when he said his first word in English. Jonathan’s mother invited us in.

As soon as I entered, I was shocked by the emptiness of the home. It was a singlewide trailer with one bedroom at either end. The one to the right was presumably the bedroom of Jonathan’s extended family. Three small girls curiously peeked out of a crack between the door and the frame before hearing their mother tell them to close it. The only furniture in sight in the entire middle section of the home was a lone picnic table, toward which the mother motioned me to sit. Erin had made small stockings for each of the two younger sisters and I’ve never seen two children so grateful to have one lollipop, a canister of generic Play-Doh, and a few stickers. They opened the Play-Doh and looked with amazement as they removed it from the can and squished it in their tiny hands. Jonathan began unwrapping his first gift, a soccer ball, when his oldest cousin opened the back bedroom door and sadly asked me a question: “Where do you put your name in to get presents?” Erin explained that she was Jonathan’s kindergarten teacher and that he was part of a program at school to give students gifts. The girl remarked that they didn’t do that at her school and then closed the door.

The afternoon sun was beginning to come through the window and I squinted and moved over before noticing the “curtains,” which were black garbage bags that had been split down the seams and then stapled to the window frame. I began to take stock of the rest of the house; not only was it devoid of furniture, but there was no television, no radio, no phone, not anything that most of us sitting in this room take for granted. Besides an old electric stove and a beat up refrigerator, the only piece of “technology” they had was an ancient microwave with a dial timer. After Jonathan opened all of his gifts, Erin gave him a hug and said “te amo”; he smiled again and went right back to his toys. Erin and I then gave his mother some cash to help them through what are sure to be tough times this holiday season. When we left, Erin told me it took everything she had not to cry when she saw how Jonathan lived. Imagine: four adults and seven children living in a trailer, presumably sleeping on the floor with blankets and eating communal meals on their one piece of furniture, a picnic table.

            The other day one of my students asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I thought about it for quite some time and I told him that I wanted him to do something kind for someone he normally wouldn’t. In our American culture, we have the tendency to point the finger when things don’t go our way—we judge, label, accuse, mock, or deride anyone who doesn’t fit our worldview. In high school it’s even worse because peer pressure often forces students to accept only certain people into the fold and shun others. If anything, I sincerely hope that the first semester of AP Human Geography has taught you that life is not black and white. Life, more than anything, is a struggle. And we all rise to meet that struggle in different ways. So before we judge, label, accuse, mock or deride those who don’t fit into our worldview or what we think of as “normal,” perhaps we should celebrate our diversity and try to become a little more inclusive of others. After all, people are people. It doesn’t matter what color your skin is, what types of food you eat, the religion you believe in, or where you come from. If you cut someone, I guarantee that person will feel pain and his/her blood will run red. We are all one family after all. We are all human beings. And all I want for Christmas is the same thing we all want: to be good to one another, to be loved, and to accept each other for who we are and not who we want them to be.