learning

I used to think that it was necessary to leave home, leave the mundane aspects of my life, and enter into a whole new world in order to learn important life lessons. Leaving home is still instructive, and new people and new places still put me in a place of complete vulnerability, which opens my eyes to newness all around me. Just being - still and motionless and at a loss for words - in a different culture is enough to teach you things. It's why I love to travel. But, recently, I've begun to feel that home can be just as exotic, and just as foreign, and can teach just as much as the world abroad.

I serve in many leadership roles in my life; I'm really pretty lucky. I never had to struggle or connive as did my classmates who wanted to be student body president; I never campaigned to be on Transy's SGA (Student Government Association) or to lead anything. Leadership roles just tumbled out of the sky and into my lap, opportunities that were both too good to pass up and also ones that I couldn't, in good conscience, dismiss. I was fifteen and my dance coaches moved to Georgia. There was no one more advanced in the dance school to coach in our teacher's absence, so another young woman and I became the de facto coaches for the school. I've been coaching for eight years now, watched little children grow into beautiful, accomplished young women. Of the things I've done in my life, being a dance coach is one of the things that I have loved the most, from which I have learned the most, and that I will miss the most when I have to move on - or when my students move on.

I started volunteering with Reading Camp when I was fifteen, as well. (A momentous year, that 15th year). This, too, was happenstance and an unexpected opportunity. I really wanted to be a counselor because it was cool, but I was too young. The Cathedral Domain wouldn't let me be a counselor yet (they ended up needing me, too, but at first this wasn't the case). Reading Camp was struggling to create a viable staff for its first year, so they let me in. And, I caught the "bug," as so many Reading Camp volunteers do, and I continued volunteering, year after year after year. I planned my summers around camp. When I was 19 I was asked to serve on the Steering Committee, which was my first experience on the "board" of any organization. And this was a great organization to be a part of - growing so quickly, it was so dynamic, so exciting, so fraught with passion and soon, fraught with angst. I watched adults quibble, squabble, and lash out in anger, deceit, and violence. I watched cruel words fly through cyberspace in an all out email battle; I was studying abroad in Morocco and watched and read from afar - never engaging in the fury of it all. Thank goodness. It was madness, and I decided I never wanted to be an adult. I still don't.

Reading Camp continued to present more leadership opportunities to me, from Steering Committee to head counselor for Pine Mountain, to, again, the de facto position of camp director alongside my friend, Rob. That came out of the blue, too, just like the dance coach position fell out of the sky. Two beloved directors decided not to direct the Pine Mountain camp anymore, and in the void they left, Rob and I were asked to step in. Wow. We were just children, directing a staff of thirty or more ranging in age from 16 to 75, with thirty campers. And, with much preparation, much communication, much planning, lots of stress, sweat, tears, and a lot of self confidence, we directed our first camp. And there were bumps in the road and troubles along the way, but we did it. And we did it two years ago and did it again last year - and we've learned with each camp how to communicate better, how to organize better, how to create a structure that is agreeable to all the staff members and allows each of them the freedom to be themselves, use their gifts to benefit the camp community, as well as allows time for reflection and quietude. There's always things that can be done better. And we keep on doing it- well, I keep on doing it, - because we love to learn. I love to learn. I love to analyze my behavior, my plans, my thoughts, and to improve upon them. I love to listen, to watch, to study others and their views of issues large and small. Most of all, I love the continually unfolding process of becoming. Of self-realization and self-actualization through self-analyzation and self-criticism.

Self-realization and self-actualization through self-analyzation and self-criticism. If that's not the name of the game of the spiritual quest, then I don't know what is. Of course there's a lot more to the climb to nirvana, salvation, heaven, and the abatement of meaninglessness, hell, and the void, but the self-realization/actualization-self-analyzation/criticism cycle is a crucial part of all of that. How can you fight the creeping-on of meaninglessness without analyzing yourself and the many activities of your life that you imbue with meaning? How can you create wholeness and defeat the void without recognizing the combatant whole versus void within yourself? How can you abate the vacuum of hell without learning from those great teachers, prophets, martyrs, and gods who came before and analyze your own life, criticize your own follies, and realize, actualize your own SELF?


So, I am puzzled, and adrift in a foreign world - in my own hometown, my own highly scheduled lifestyle, my own structured rubric of a life.

Because, when I live my life in a constant state of self-teaching, self-learning, self-analyzing, self-deconstructing, and self-building, I am utterly bewildered, dumbfounded, and stopped DEAD when I encounter adults, who, by all accounts, are mature and self-sufficient individuals, but who are again, utterly INCAPABLE of such self-processing. Who do not see their effect on other people, or, who do not care. Who do not acknowledge that their view of reality is NOT REALITY, but is their construction of it. Who cannot seem to grasp that others might see the world differently, and have just as valid a view as they do. And even, MORE valid.

Who cannot see that they exhibit what Friedman referred to as "emotional regression," who deal in anxieties, personalities, and the blaming of others - instead of learning to criticize themselves, perhaps blame themselves, learn from their mistakes, and develop the disciplined practice of reforming their behavior.

I have little patience for myself when I am this way, so I feel justified to say this: that I have little patience for people who find no utility in processing their own behavior, finding their own faults, and reforming themselves to become something more useful, more efficient, more consistent, more accurate, more graceful, more compassionate, and more loving.

So, to conclude, God HELP me to return to this spiritual practice of self-betterment when I fall along the way. God HELP me to remain patient with those who fall as well.


and God HELP all of us who are in relationships with those who are utterly incapable, and perhaps always will be, of the aforementioned self-process.