Petty Annoyances

Drastic and chronic lack of sleep has a habit of creating large emotions from petty annoyances. A perfect example would be the routine closing of my garage door while I’m driving my eldest daughter down to the bus, by the woman who comes to feed the barn cats (not mine) every morning.

Most mornings, I walk to the bus with all my daughters. The eldest is in high school, and we don’t have much private time to talk. I value these quiet times, when she opens up and tells me about her life, her feelings, her concerns, her joys. She’s a morning person, ready to talk as soon as she wakes up; I’m a night person, and usually struggling for alertness through my cup of morning coffee. My silences joined with her alertness lead to openings that perhaps wouldn’t have a chance to come to fruition later in the day when I gear up for the daily whirlwind.

On the rare days that we drive down, it’s almost always because it’s snowing or raining hard enough to make us both miserable. So I drive her down, and we sit for a few minutes while waiting for the bus. I miss the walking those days, since I don’t have time for exercising the rest of the day, and we still get in a little talk during the five minutes or so while we wait for the bus.

I come home in a haze of not-quite-wakefulness, enhanced by the glow of a teenaged sharing, to find that I need to climb out of my car in the pouring rain or blizzard, to open the garage door again. And there goes the magic of my quiet contemplative mood. It takes me hours to regain my equilibrium.

This is a new development. She just started to come feed the cats. She’s a retired woman, given a home by my landlords on a different house on the property while she helps care for her adult daughter struggling with cancer. It was the only way she could move back in-state to help care for her daughter, and my landlords are doing an amazing thing, giving her a place to live in return for feeding the stray cats and barn cats and painting fences. At any other time, I would be filled with compassion for the situation this woman is in.

But on those icy cold mornings, as I plow through the snow, and curse and struggle to heave open the barn door to get my car back inside so it doesn’t layer with two inches of snow before I leave for work, I lose all compassion, all empathy, all peace, and burn with resentment and frustration. Why doesn’t she get it? The door is always closed, I only leave it open when I drive my high school daughter down. She knows what I’m doing; we’ve conversed about it other times as I walk back to the house as she drives up the driveway and she asks what I’ve been doing out and about so early. It’s a really heavy sliding barn door, requiring major heaving effort to open and close the door. I don’t like getting snow and rain down my neck, which is why I left the door open to begin with, so I could just drive right back in and dash for the house.

So why is she compelled to close that door on the mornings that I drive down? Why is she arriving earlier and earlier? She used to come when my younger daughters and I were running around getting them off for the day, getting myself off for the day. She’d park in the driveway so I’d have to wait for her to finish and back out, in order to get out myself. I guess I could be grateful she’s not parking there while we’re rushing out to get the other two on the bus and me to work.

And why is it that such a petty little annoyance can wreak such havoc with my morning, unsettling me to this degree? Where is that calm collectedness that keeps me centered all the rest of the day as life whirls around me and autistic children kick me and job frustrations chip away at my savings and heat spirals out of my leaky old barn house? Why is it so hard to cope with such a tiny thing?

“Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.”
~ Robert Service

Courtesies

“Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.” ~ Henry Clay (1777-1852), politician and orator

Last night, my eldest daughter and I had an interesting conversation about how to succeed at school. She’s frustrated with one teacher whom she feels plays favorites. I can remember that same feeling, and how horrible it felt. Ironically, it was a teacher teaching the same subject.

I didn’t have many words of advice to give my daughter. It’s a dilemma that I never figured out how to solve when I was in high school, either. All I could do, in the end, was recommend that she be herself, be nice, and ignore the favoritism. If nothing else, she can walk away from the situation knowing she did nothing wrong.

And who knows. Continuing to be straight with this teacher, offering her the same courtesies and acknowledgments that she gives all her other teachers may pay off in the end. Perhaps one small courtesy will strike deep.

Kootchie Koo!

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”
~ Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Today, I worked with Jake. He is autistic, plus other special needs. He is five and a half. He is finally learning how to use the potty. He is slender, lightening fast, and has better gross motor skills than many nine-year-olds that I know. Jake has very few words, and his ability to communicate is sketchy, at best.

I worked with him at his house this afternoon. We worked on word fluency. He can look at a picture of a ball, and it might take him 10-15 seconds of concentrated effort to pull the word “ball” out of his mind and across his tongue. He might say “throwing” first, because that’s the function he has associated with that item. He might say the color, too, or the shape, or the last noun he named, while struggling to recall and pronounce that nebulous name “ball”.

Jake will scream loudly, like a fire siren, when he can’t think of words to tell you his needs. Or he will hit. Or he will throw himself down on the ground and curl into a ball. Sometimes he will sit and quietly weep.

Jake also has flashes of brilliance. Not intellectual brilliance – the kind of brilliance that lights up his face and explodes my heart with joy. They happen sometimes when he successfully pees on the potty. He looks up, smiles from the depths of his being, and my heart just melts. He knows he’s done something remarkable.

Today, we played tag. It was a strange silly version of tag that perhaps only an autistic child would enjoy. It started after he came downstairs with a pair of socks on, with a hole in the heel of one foot. When I saw him poking at the hole in his heel, I stuck my finger in the hole and said, “kootchie, kootchie, koo!” He shrieked and hid his foot under his other leg.

Part of my challenge as an ABA therapist is to interpret his shrieks, and give him words for communicating. It’s a guessing game at best. Was he shrieking in delight or frustration? I tried, “No tickle, Slaw,” but he didn’t respond. Usually, if I guess a close sentiment, he parrots my words back. Hmmm – he wasn’t minding the tickling. Was he perhaps enjoying the game? I tried again, poking his heel and kootchie koo-ing. He shrieked again, and I said, “More, Slaw!” No response again. But a giant smile this time.

Next thing I knew, we were racing back and forth across the basement floor, with Jake laughing big belly laughs, gales of delight! When I caught up to him, usually when he threw himself headlong onto the bed in the corner of the room, he would wave his feet in my face, and then try to hide the foot with the holey sock before I could poke my finger in again.

When I fell down in exhaustion, I heard some magical words. “Get you!” That was Jake, asking me to chase him again. I told him, “Get me, Slaw!” and he shouted back, “Get me!” So off we raised again, and again, and again, until finally I fell down on the floor again in exhaustion, this time pretending to be asleep.

This time, from across the room, I heard, “Get me, Slaw!” While I snored away, I heard, “Get me, Miss Slaw!” and finally, “Come get me, Miss Slaw!”

That’s a five word sentence! Enunciated correctly, with joy, appropriately used! In Jake’s case, almost miraculous.

As I snored on, still pretending to sleep, I heard, “Wake up! Wake up, Slaw! Come get me, Slaw!” With that, as Sleeping Beauty wakes with a kiss from her prince, so Jake’s words were as kisses to my ears, and off we raced, with Jake shrieking in joy, and my heart singing from a small step toward human contact.

Life can be very good.

Lectio Divina

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
~ e. e. cummings

A friend just suggested that perhaps I could use my writing or journaling as my own personal lectio divina tool, to help me find my place in the world. I had to look it up, having no idea what a lectio divina tool might be. The answer I found sounds appealing. I will try a commitment to write every day for the rest of the month, in my own small fashion participating in NaNoWriMo, since I don’t have enough time to try to write 50,000 words this month on top of graduate school and parenting work.

Lectio is reverential listening; listening both in a spirit of silence and of awe. We are listening for the still, small voice … that will speak to us personally - not loudly, but intimately. In lectio we read slowly, attentively, gently listening to hear a word or phrase that is the word for us this day.

Translating that to my writing means that I must enter a place of stillness in my writing, and be open to the words or messages that might come to me. I have often described my writing as an opening, almost a channeling of something outside of myself. When my best writing comes out, I don’t feel in control of it. Rather, I seek to ride the torrent of words that flows through me in the way that a sailor finds the sweet spot in the wind to push her sailboat to the maximum, finding a delicate balance between over-steering and losing the wind or riding so high that the wind flips the boat over.

Once we have found a word or a passage that speaks to us in a personal way, we must take it in and “ruminate” on it. We must take in the words - that is, memorize them - and while gently repeating them to ourselves, allow the words to interact with our thoughts, our hopes, our memories, our desires. This is the second step or stage in lectio divina - meditatio. Through meditatio we allow those words to touch us and affect us at our deepest levels.

I have fallen out of a habit of meditating, lately. I have been busy, thinking, creating, writing, reading, job searching, learning new ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) techniques, pondering what worked and what didn’t in my work with autistic children. I have been researching for projects, researching for job ideas, thinking hard about where my place is. Perhaps I need to spend more time in reflection and meditation, thinking about the still, small voice that speaks to me.

The third step in lectio divina is oratio - prayer: the offering of parts of ourselves that we have not previously believed wanted. In this we allow the words that we have taken in and on which we are pondering to touch and change our deepest selves. In this oratio, we allow our real selves to be touched and changed by the words.

Perhaps, in taking the time to write regularly, to think deeply about the words I write, and to allow myself to be touched and changed by those words, I will understand the path my life needs to take.

"The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes."
~ Benjamin Disraeli

Tyranny

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
~ C. S. Lewis, English essayist & juvenile novelist (1898 - 1963)

How ironic, that there is a great movement afoot to ban children and families from viewing the movie "Golden Compass" or reading Philip Pullman's wonderful series, His Dark Materials. I've received emails telling me the book is anti-Christian, that the author, an atheist, is attempting to recruit children to atheism. It's true, Pullman is a self-avowed agnostic (see his website), but I found the series incredibly spiritual and profound in its questions about the meaning of life and how we should aspire to live.

The banning email in question refers to the Narnia series, the great work that C. S. Lewis wrote for children, as an example of what Pullman is trying to destroy. And yet, Lewis abhorred censorship, as evidenced by his quote above.

I plan to watch the movie when it's released. We already own the books, and love them.

Technology and Education

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
~ Charles Darwin

This semester, I am taking a class called Computers as a Teacher’s Aide. It’s been somewhat interesting.

At the beginning of the class, the professor asked us what would make the class boring for us. I responded by writing that if the class was geared to absolute neophytes in MS Office products, which is what we’re learning about, I would be bored. Sadly, most of the students (most of whom are under 25) are neophytes, and can’t keep up with the projects or lectures in class. Luckily, I learn at least one new thing each class, which keeps my attention engaged enough to be able to stay awake through class. This week, I learned about that cool little marker tool in PowerPoint, that you can use to mark up slides in the middle of a presentation. Never noticed that before.

I’ve been pondering why I am the most technologically literate person in the class, as a 50-year-old returning non-traditional student. I am shocked at how non-proficient the younger students are, since in my family, the younger the sibling, the more technologically proficient we grew to be. I didn’t have computers in the home before I hit young adulthood. My youngest brother grew up with an Apple 2c.

Taking this class has led me on a time-consuming and fascinating path to discovering exactly what is out there on the new internet: a wealth of tools that I never dreamed about, a Pandora’s Box of ways for my children to get themselves in trouble without education and supervision (which NONE of them are receiving at school) and an amazing array of ideas that can revolutionize education.

And what are the teachers that I meet saying about these tools? “Why do we need them? Children learn just fine without them.” or “It’s just too much trouble to learn how to do this.” And our children are merrily marching off to a future that we can’t even begin to dream of, and will work in jobs that haven’t yet been created, doing work that hasn’t yet been invented, using tools that are unimaginable to us today.

Today, I got lost in cyberspace, reading a wiki on education and technology.

Tomorrow, and for the rest of my days as a teacher, I will be thinking about the implications of all the new technology on how I will teach. I am already writing a paper on how to use wikis to facilitate group writing projects.

I am glad to be alive in today’s world, with all its glorious potential.

“The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
~ Alvin Toffler