Teachers change the world.
"After class, a student said thank you. It's a heady experience to have a class go well. A class is kind of a garage band, everybody pounding away on their own instruments and something new and interesting and celebratory flying into the air," Kathleen Dean Moore writes in her book Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature. (Trumpeter, Boston, 2010, 26)
These three sentences are part of the chapter, "The Happy Basket," where Moore tells of having decided to do some intentional observations about what made her happy. She simply (or not so simply, as is often more the case) put a basket on her desk and every time she found herself really, deep-down happy, she jotted down on a slip of paper what she was doing at the time. Thus she gathered raw data for her personal happiness experiment. A really good class experience turned out to be one of the things that made her happy.
Yesterday I was gathering up over-winter leaves from flower beds. Earlier I had stacked a few pieces of wood, and raked up a wind drift of leaves from the lawn-- not a lot of extensive, heavy work, just a little of this and a little of that in the sunshine and crisp, quiet air, under the elegant, naked branches. And suddenly, crouching there with my bare fingers carefully, gently wriggling in the dirt around those sturdy new daffodil and tulip and hyacinth and crocus leaves coming along, I noticed I was smiling, and so relaxed. Just happy. Really, deeply happy. That felt satisfaction, the all-is-well feeling, that in-the-body knowing of happy.
It is a worthy experiment, I think, to truly notice and pay deep attention to what makes you happy. In today's Ash Wednesday daily meditation, "A New Start," Father Richard Rohr writes, "Today you must pray for the desire to desire."
What do you truly desire? What makes you truly happy?
Teachers change the world. And, oh wait, everyone is a teacher.
We learn from each other anytime, anyplace, we can't begin to know when we are teaching someone something just by the way we are being.
So, if we can identify moments that make us truly happy, and if we also can desire to desire good things, happiness, for ourselves and others, then will we become the best people we can be? Then will we have quiet (or boisterous), ordinary influence that changes the world? I'm suspecting that's how it might work. Now, I'm going into my day to find out what else makes me happy.
By the way, I'm thankful for every one of the teachers in my life. And I've noticed that a deeply thankful feeling is one of the experiences that makes me happy.
I think I'm seeing an increase in the number authors describing how to be happy. It's probably a lucrative topic! Ms. Moore's chapter on observing what made her happy reminds me of this "happiness project" blog http://www.happiness-project.com/ by Gretchen Rubin. I kept seeing links to this blog, but I must admit, I wasn't impressed when I finally clicked over there. She advertises her NY times bestseller by the same name (told you it's lucrative!) in which she describes the success of various happiness tips that she has tried herself. Get more sleep and more exercise seem to be what's on her blog lately. Not exactly earth shattering. (But, hey, it's solid advice that more Americans should follow at any rate.)
ReplyDeleteI may have told you that Scott and Kathy are fans of Daniel Todd Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert That's one that I mean to read sometime. He's the psychologist who says we're pretty bad when it comes to making decisions about what will make us happy in the future. The best we can do is base the decision on what would make us happy in the present. It's a thought I've been holding in my mind as I try to figure out what my next job should be.
Scott and Kathy said recently they went to a talk by Gilbert. He decided to speak on a topic that he hadn't covered in the book--whether or not having children makes you happy. I think his answer was, "not inherently," but evidently it was a sufficiently negative that a few parents left the talk in a huff. Hah! I like him already because, while Rubin's advice is banal, his is a harder pill to swallow!