Teaching, as a job, has a way of wearing you down, of chipping away at you bit by dessicated bit, and then sometimes all at once, until one day, in the middle of 3rd period, you realize there is nothing left of you to give, and yet you do give because in that moment, at least, there is no other choice.
I am writing this from the husk. At this point in the year I feel hollowed out; all substance consumed, every ounce of energy leeched. I am writing from this place to bear witness to a moment that is real and true. I write from this place not to give more of what I already do not have, but in an attempt to understand it, and to hold it in grace. I have been here before, and I will be here again. Thus is the nature of this profession.
A few weeks ago, I shared T.S. Eliot’s poem “Wait Without Hope” with my students. The goal, I told them, was to read it everyday and to write down a thought. That was it. Then yesterday, we closed out the exercise with a free-write about the experience.
Here is the poem:
Wait Without Hope
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
I first encountered this poem a few years ago while listening to Martha Beck’s podcast, and I was dumbfounded as to its meaning. Particularly the line, “wait without hope.” Hope is what I have built my entire life on. I hope – that is what I do! It’s a tragedy to lose hope, isn’t it? Doesn’t it mean that you’re giving up? Doesn’t it mean you’re giving in – granting permission to the slaughter?
“Wait without hope,” it is such a foreign concept to me, and yet, over the years I have found myself returning to these words again and again – something whispering to me, beckoning me closer, begging me to listen. When I too was reflecting I asked myself this question:
What do you hope for that could be considered “the wrong thing?”
This is what I said:
I still hope that I will be perfect.
Tired I know… but I can’t seem to let it go. There is still a part of me that believes that if I can somehow make this happen then everything will make sense. I will finally be at ease. That through perfection attained, I will have solved the great mystery of my life and all the pieces will fall into place. No more regret, frustration, or uncertainty. No more clawing at the depths to figure out what any of this means and what my place is in it.
It means that once I am perfect I will flawlessly execute my job. That it will finally be easy. That my students, every single one of them, will blossom under my care, and live the beautiful lives they deserve.
I still hope that the world will all of a sudden be different.
That tomorrow I will wake up and we – humanity – will have figured this all out. That we will stop killing one another. That we will all live tender, free, and abundant lives.
In the scope of teaching that looks like not being attacked for being inclusive. It means smaller class sizes and better compensation for our efforts. It means moving slower and with more intention. It means being valued and respected for the expertise that I have painstakingly built over the years.
I still hope that all it will take is me trying harder.
That all I have to do to be perfect, to fix the world, to solve everything is to give a little bit more. Because I can do that. I’m really good at that.
I am so good at that – you don’t even know.
And still at this moment, I find myself wondering if these are really the wrong things to hope for. To hope that there’s less suffering… To hope that education will one day realize its full and beautiful potential… To hope for a better world… To hope that I could be a part of that…?
The trouble is… I’m getting tired, and my hope has begun to take me out at the knees.
I have ‘kept on keeping on’ for years, and over time, I feel like there’s less and less of me left at the end of every school year.
Frankly, the way I work is not sustainable, and yet I can’t seem to bring myself to change it, so attached I am to this wild hope. Because the antithesis feels like despair. Because I know the beauty of what could be.
Eliot’s plea to “wait without hope” is a suggestion that perhaps there is a future waiting for us beyond what we can currently imagine. That grasping and impatience are folly pursuits leading us astray. And yet it’s hard to be patient when there is so much destruction. It’s hard to wait when I see some measure of that destruction in my classroom day in and day out. And it’s painful when the weight of that destruction is placed on your shoulders as an educator – doubly so when you come to the realization that nothing you do will ever be enough.
Because that is true.
Nothing I do will ever be enough. I can give and give and give and give, and this job – this world – will always ask for more.
Teaching is a sacred profession. I love it so much.
But lately, I have begun to ask: is it more sacred than my own life? Do I love it more than I love myself?
My bleeding heart wants to scream, “yes, of course!”
My intuition lovingly asserts, “of course not.”
So how do I do it? How do I “wait without hope?” How do I do this job for another sixteen years and love myself, and the work, and the world all at the same time?
I wish I could say I had an answer – but I don’t. Some days, most days, it’s okay and it seems like I have it figured out. But then, times like these come roaring in and it’s all I can do to not turn my back in defeat.
When I get like this, I usually despair, talk to friends and family, hike, create and wait for the feeling to pass. It eventually does, but right now I am trying something different in the hopes that I may finally steer myself towards some answers – some deeper understanding.
I can’t remember in what context I heard this, but somebody somewhere posed this question:
How would you choose to live your life if you knew that nothing would change?
What would I do if I fully accepted that I will never be perfect, that we will never stop killing one another, that my work will never be enough to alleviate all the suffering, that the system will always be flawed and inequitable, that – as Parker Palmer put it – we will always be in the “tragic gap¹?”
…
Look, I know there is hubris embedded in this hope of mine. It’s arrogant of me to think that I alone could solve issues that people older and far wiser than myself have worked their entire lives to solve. I know it takes a village and I know it takes time.
In education we love to say that, “we are planting the seeds of trees whose shade we will never experience.” Which makes absolute sense to me – AND – in times like these I have to ask: where the fuck is the shade from the generations of those who have done the good work before us? They were there, they lived, they toiled. This is in no way an indictment of them, but rather an indictment of us – of society as we have made it. Perhaps we are lacking the shade because as soon as one of those trees is ready to stretch its branches wide we cut it down. We destroy it. Wayward as we are, we demolish it to make more things that we do not need, in order to fill the gaps that cannot be filled with things alone.
AND
Perhaps this is my cynicism coming through. The shade, the fruit, the progress, I do see it, I do feel it. It is there when you look for it, I just wish we didn’t have to look so hard.
And I think that’s what makes me so resentful at times. It’s not the reality that I am never going to experience the full fruit of my labor, it’s that there’s a chance that labor could be wasted, twisted, cut down, turned into scrap – forgotten. Which is yet another thing I have no control over.
The tragic gap… Sometime is just too fucking tragic. And yet, if that truly is the work of our lives – to find a way to live, and love, and work, and find grace in that space – when I really set my mind to it, when I ask myself if I can live with that – I think the answer is yes… I just don’t know how yet.
Or hell, maybe I do. Maybe I am already doing the work and this is just what it feels like – I guess that could be equally just as possible.
Regardless, something has to shift. I’ve been saying it for years. Friends and family have been privy to my broken record of woes, and for that I am both grateful and sorry. What that shift is… I currently do not know.
And the reality beyond this realization, is that the realization itself as well as the acknowledgement of it is terrifying. I have been able to live in this grind for years and it feels like a failure to admit that I can’t, and maybe even do not want to, do it like I have been doing it anymore.
So where do I go from here and still live and work in integrity?
One thing I’ve learned in occupational therapy is that we have to be intentional about the shifts we want to see. If you want to train your mind to see your value – for example – you have to give yourself credit for what went right that day (no matter how small seeming), writing it down every night in a consistent place, so that in times of uncertainty you can go back to it as tangible proof of your worth. As much as I hated doing it – it worked.
So perhaps it’s about being more intentional, in small, manageable ways.
Perhaps, as I do with most of my feelings and ideas, it’s about writing it down.
Perhaps it’s about being accountable to myself, trusting that I already know how.
Wait without hope…
Maybe waiting without hope means actually giving myself credit for the work I am doing, and not obsessing over what didn’t get accomplished. Maybe it means that what gets done that day was enough. Maybe it means that the grace I give my students is also something I am worthy of myself. Maybe it means that beauty will always exist despite the horror and that, if we continue to reach for it despite everything, it will always win in the end.
Maybe it means finally granting myself permission to believe it.
1. Author, educator, activist Parker Palmer discusses and writes about the idea of “The Tragic Gap” extensively, and in-depth in his book Healing the Heart of Democracy