I'm Not Feeling This Today

I get the students ready to write. We have our packets and a prompt. We have pens and pencils. We have two minutes on the timer because today we'll write four short bursts that become something like an essay or a poem. I ask, "we ready to write?" and a kid says, "I'm not feeling this today. I ain't doing it." He's waiting for me to say he has to, waiting for me to push back. Instead, I become a ghost and say, "I know what you mean."

We write. Four two-minute bursts. That kid isn't feeling the writing. He ain't doing it. We keep going. I end up writing about him. It comes out great. I should thank him, but I don't. He would think I'm mocking him.

After writing, I ask each person the same question: "Is there something you wrote today that you can read to us?" I give two answers from which we choose: either, "yes, and here it is" or "not today." The second answer is to leave the door open for next time. These students are reluctant to share. They aren't feeling it. They ain't doing it. I invite and give them a way to decline without deciding they'll never ever share.

When I get to that kid I say, "I know you weren't feeling up to writing, so I won't mess with you by asking if you want to read." I turn to the next kid: "Is there something you wrote today that you can read to us?" He says, "not today."

After sharing, we move to reading books. Everyone but the kid grabs their book, fills out the box on their writing packet listing the author's name, book title, and their starting page number. They begin reading. I encourage the kid to grab his book knowing what he'll say. "I'm not feeling reading. I ain't doing it." I almost smile. He stares into his phone and keeps showing it to someone next to him.

Quietly I say, "I'm going to find you a place to chill so we can keep reading and you can do your thing." He starts to get upset about being sent out of class, but my tone is light, friendly, earnest. "Come on," I say. "There's a place right out here..."

He's gone now. I could have gotten in his face, told him he had to read, but I wasn't feeling like getting a fight started. I ain't doing that. I'm feeling something else, something almost good. I don't want to get in the way of that.

Out there, he's probably still on his phone. When I left him I said, "thank you for coming with me and being cool." He looked to see if I was messing with him and saw that I wasn't. He shrugged. I don't know exactly why, but I thanked him again. Maybe it was just because I was feeling it.

Out The Window And Inside

The assignment:

1. Look outside. Write that for two minutes.
2. What's stressing you out? Write that for two minutes.
3. What's one thing you can do about it? Write that for two minutes.
4. Look outside again. Write that for two minutes.

The idea was to show how we can compose in mysterious fashion, sandwiching inner feelings between two accounts of the outside world. What follows is what I wrote over four classes.

---

The First Class

The sky is open and light blue. Not the deep blue of August or the aquamarine of the Caribbean Sea. No, the light blue, trying-not-to-be-grey of October Syracuse. A blue that says, it will soon be winter, that says, enjoy this moment which is already gone. The leaves seem already to be falling. Blades of grass reach up in one last wish for love.

This job is stressing me. Another teacher in the system resigned yesterday. That teacher was brand new in August and will be gone by November, a leaf on a tree falling from the branch, drifting on the autumn wind, settling somewhere new.

Envy does me no good. Better to be happy for someone living that dream and feel it as fuel for my own choices. My autumn winds may be coming. Naomi Shihab Nye writes:

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

The sky is bluer now than it was. It's almost summer vacation blue, the blue of hope and faith, the blue of believing. That's the blue under which grass still grows and leaves reconsider falling, the whole world alive as if all of us are ready to be reborn.

---

The Second Class

I need to slow down. The sky tells me so. There is no wind to push my sails and take me anywhere. The day is still. Even the birds just stare. A plane arcs across the sky, it's engines throttled down. No hurry. We are all coming in for some landing. The grass will catch us. The ground is soft and forgiving.

There's too much to do and too many people after my attention. I want to be left alone with my pen and the blank page. I want to be alone, in solitude, all by myself. The stress of all these people is like the Nikki Giovanni poem:

Sometimes
when I wake up
in the morning
and see all the faces
I just can't
breathe

My heart beats too fast. My lungs go shallow. My mind races ahead out of this moment into nothing, into darkness.

And so I write. I breathe through the pen. I can't send these people away, stop teaching, quit the job, but I can sit inside this body, crawl inside my head, and accept how things are. I'm my own man and despite the stress I choose the life I want and what I will feel as I'm rocked by outside forces.

Out by the side of the road an orange sign with black letters stands as a warning. The way through is passable but not smooth or easy. Drivers are waved through one at a time. The tires kick up dust that rises and must fall somewhere. The drivers pass onward under an almost perfect blue sky to places I'm imagining and finding in my dreams.

---

The Third Class

It looks peaceful out there, but a kid just said, "it's brick." I'm old and don't know exactly what that means, but it can't be good. It's cold as October should be. I can live with that. Cold isn't bad. Not when the sun shines. Not when the sky is blue. Not when I'm breathing and getting through the day.

It's tough being around negative people who complain to and about me. I get that it's not really about me, but it feels that way when people are cruel. They're all hurting. I get that. But I wish we could get along for just this hour. I want them to understand that it's easier that way, but they don't believe.

I can complain and beg them to change, but what good will that do? It's me who must stop expecting them to be other than who and how they are. Their lives are theirs. The more I accept that and let go, the more peace I'll find.

The leaves are changing. Snow will come. The sky will turn ashen grey. The sun will set and rise again no matter what I do. If I'm happy, the leaves still die. If I'm sad, snow still comes. And no matter my anger and frustration, the world still turns on its axis from light to shadow and back into light. Out in the field, the geese accept all this. Who am I to argue with geese? I watch them all take off into the blue sky and almost smile.

---

The Fourth Class

It's calm outside. The road construction guys are on a break. Even the leaves just hang instead of falling. The grass is in no hurry. The clouds chill in a cold sky. The geese have flown or gone into hiding. Nothing is moving. I stare and feel nothing but relief.

I've had negative people crowd my life today. Their problems weighing me down now, making me tired. I wonder what I've done to deserve all this. Clint Eastwood tells me, "deserve's got nothing to do with it."

The negative people go. They remain only if I choose to hang onto them. If I let go thinking about all that, let those thoughts go out the door with those people, then I have the chance to feel better. It's totally up to me.

A dump truck pulls down the street. Going, going, gone. It is heavy, loaded full, and moving slowly. Somewhere down the line the driver will back up and dump that heavy load. The truck, lighter, will go on to the next job. There is always another job, another day. As for now, the world outside the window is calm, quiet, and trying to teach me all I need to know.

Note From The Parking Lot Last Week

Written a week ago while waiting for my daughter to finish swim practice.
Things have changed since then, for the better, as things often do.

My therapist asked today when I want to come back. I flipped a page in my weekly planner considering that I might need to come back in a week. No, I thought and flipped to the second page and offered three dates. She responded that she was gone for half of that week and so had nothing then. I turned another page and read off two more dates, one of which worked. There was an unusual tone in her voice throughout this exchange. It had been a heavy duty session. I was writing the appointment in my planner, head down, when she said, "if you need to see me sooner, you can call." It was the first time she has offered that option so far as I can remember. My memory may be failing me. I've had other times of trouble. She caught me a little flat-footed. Had I seemed that far gone? When she said it, I felt a weighted bar laid across my shoulders. Maybe it was there before and I was just now really feeling it. Whatever the case, I felt myself sinking under it.

At home, my younger daughter was phoneless after having dropped hers in soup this morning. A high school girl living without a phone feels strange and awful. Easy for me to imagine surviving without one. I grew up in another time and now have a phone in my pocket nearly always. I didn't say, this might be good for you, because it didn't feel good to her. She said, friendships hurt. Sometimes, I told her. She reminds me too much of myself, wanting love that seems unavailable from others and which she can't muster for herself. I wondered how to help when the air seemed to have gone out of the world. "Secure your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others." I gave her a hug and my phone to use for the next day.

My wife's stomach went into revolt and she hasn't slept in days. Her allergic eyes swelled one quarter shut and no one seems to know what to do about that. She has seen all the doctors but her maladies remain mysteries. She's also working a new job and that too feels like trying to get through each day without enough rest and too many things going wrong.

Then my older daughter feels unnoticed. As a child she didn't quite say "you don't love me enough" but we read between her silences. Telling her, holding her, doing what we can for her, these things are and aren't enough. Love is wondrous but too often we worry more about it running out, going down some drain. She swims laps in the pool to prepare for her next meet and I wonder does all that work strengthen the metaphorical heart too?

The odometer will tick over to 173,100 within the next mile. It may only be feet away from this parking spot or perhaps longer than I can go tonight. I'm just so tired.

---

The paycheck came and relieved some of the worries. I've begun to see possible ways of moving on from my current job. We have gone out with friends. My younger daughter understands that some things come from within. My older daughter knows that some things are coming to her from without. My wife got an eye cream and knows some of what happened with her stomach but still can't sleep.

The odometer is approaching 174,000. The car starts every morning. Even when I'm tired, it's nothing at all to drive the miles and a joy to take my girls and myself toward our destinations.

A week and a half from now I'll return to therapy and see what's next.

Good Days

The perfect day isn't perfect. It is instead good, very good perhaps. I too often overlook good in search of better and perfect. Good is good. It is contentment which ought to be my only goal because I can choose to feel content.

Since this is my blog, let's focus on me for a bit. Let me tell you about my perfectly good day.

It begins without the alarm but in the October dark. I get up from under a thick blanket and replace blanket with coffee, sleeping with living, dreaming with writing. I go downstairs, grind beans, and press a good cup of coffee. I take my pen and coffee to the basement to write three pages by hand. There's no way I would rather begin each day.

Morning Pages written, I make buttered toast with jam and eat on the couch while reading a book as the family wakes and comes down one by one to get ready for school and work. I offer to drive kids to school or walk the dog, whatever works for them and by eight o'clock the house is mine. I put on a record, boot the Chromebook, and get to work.

First I focus on developing things. Creating. Drafting. Typing. This is when a blog post likely comes to mind, goes to my fingers, appears on the screen, and eventually gets posted online. This is when I continue working on long essays, stories, and sections of a book. I work through a few records until about eleven or noon at which point I print some of that stuff and get out of the chair.

My body needs to move. I go for a walk or a run to work my mind in a different way. I may think about writing or maybe just move. A shower follows and maybe a load of laundry or some brief housework. I warm up leftovers or make somethings for lunch and eat while reading the web or my book.

Then maybe a nap. I set an alarm, read on the couch until I fall asleep and recharge. After that I probably go to the library, buy coffee beans, get cash, pick up something from the hardware store, or make a stop at the co-op. Much as I can, I run these errands on foot, preferably with the dog. Moving my body after the nap puts me back in the world.

The kids and my wife come home and I spend time with them, drive them where they need to go, attend to their needs. We cook dinner and eat together. After dinner we clean up.

The rest of the evening is unscheduled. We may catch the latest Doctor Who or Atypical together. I might would go out with a friend. Whatever the case, the day ends with Stephanie and me tucked into bed, the lights out, rain turning to light snow.

I drift into sleep thinking, I can't wait to do it again tomorrow.

That's a good day. Just about perfect, though I'm content with good. I could be content for years of days like that. Now I just have to make it happen.