I wasn't feeling so hot this afternoon, so while the girls went out to a family pool party I curled up on the couch and watch Star Was: Phantom Menace. Now, while I will admit that I am asucker for anything from the Star Wars, Star Trek and Monty Python franchises, I really do like the Jedi. Even before I read about how George Lucas had modeled various groups after different Earthly cultures, I could tell that there was a lot of Zen Buddhism in the Jedi code.
This afternoon, the line that stuck with me is one of my all time favorites. Speaking to a very young Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon says "Always remember, your focus determines your reality". For me, this is a time of year when the opportunity to engage this practice is made very obvious.
As I get ready to go back to work this week, I feel a lot of things. I have enjoyed the summer with my family and going back to work means that I have less time each day that I can dedicate to them, but this is something I have learned to take in stride. What is interesting about returning to school is that there are no feelings that sit on the fence. For me, the experience of returning to school is very polarized.
On the one hand I love working with the kids. These days I teach special needs students at the high school level, and they are wonderful. I have never worked with a group of young people who are so open and joyful about what the day has to offer. Sometimes things don't go well, but they have great capacity for moving on to the next thing. In fact, the school as a whole is full of "potential energy" in September. Just walking through the halls energizes me.
On the other hand, there are difficult people to. People who seem bound and determined to be unhappy and who want to spread their negativity.
When I am at my worste, I walk down the hall and I can only see the dark energy. Surrounded by hundreds of people, I only perceive the negative ones. So for a long time, I set out to see only the good. I worked very hard at cultivating the ability to see the positive and to use them to blockout the negative. However, this never worked. Invariably something bad would happen to shatter my utopian day dream, whether it was a fight, and argument, or people who just want to swim up stream.
What my practice has helped me see, is that a true focus includes all these people and their stories. Things may not be perfect (in a building with over 1000 teenagers, really?), but they are never as bad as the worst of it would indicate. When I can pull back my focus to include all of the students and the staff, what I find is an enormous and detail mosaic. It is a movie with a cast of 1000's and each is the principle character. Every day is the best day, and the worst day for someone in the building.
My hope and practice for this school year is to encounter all of them as they are, in the time, place, condition and degree in which I find them.
I love being a teacher. It is how I keep learning.
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