Do you ever wonder if you're faking your way through life? Have you ever wondered if it is worth the time it takes to plan your day? Interruptions get through into our path as teachers and classes, every single day. People talk about how flexible teachers have to be, but we don't always bend around the issues: sometimes we must deflect or absorb the bullets instead.
 | In Kim Bearden's book, Crash Course, she refers to that "flexibility" as improvisation. That's an interesting word choice, since we truly do improvise for hours every day. That's really what we are doing when we have conversations, and if we are having conversations and not "preaching" to our students, we are probably on the right track. In many of life's situations, there are detours and roadblocks that keep us from reaching our desired destination. When we encounter them, we have two choices: we can continue driving forward, or we can give up. But first, we have to accept that things don't always go as planned; we have to be willing to recalculate our route. |
If every day is another opportunity to experience an adventure, we have to embrace uncertainty. We can become frustrated, or we can allow the current to carry us hither and thither. We can know where we are going, but we must constantly enact course corrections along the way. The last line in this paragraph from Bearden is especially true:
We are sometimes hit with obstacle after obstacle, and we allow these to defeat us or we give up. Obstacles are not there to make us quit; rather, they are there to direct us to take another route - one that we would not have chosen otherwise. We miss the meaning, though, if we don't notice the signs along the way. Every single life has twists and turns, setbacks and detours. The roadblocks are a part of our unique journey - we must accept that the mystery ahead is what allows us to live with the thrill of anticipation. We all have different life maps, and each continues to unfold with all its beauty, pain, wonder, and drama. After all, our problems do not define us; how we respond to them does.
I talk to my class about properly responding to all of these uncertainties and others. Our responses probably say more about our character than our initial actions.
