Life As Paradox

            Yesterday we had our concluding seminar for the Environment and Natural Resource Use unit.  As with all other Seminar 10s, this one urged the students to think about how they could affect change in the world.  This particular one was focused on how students could utilize their talents and interests to think of a project they could create to help resolve some issue facing the world.  They were encouraged to think systematically about the issue, recognizing the interconnectedness between issues in order to create a project that could maximize their and its potential: instead of just a school to foster literacy for example, it could be a school where literacy comes hand in hand with environmental awareness.  Only eleven of our seventeen total students showed up, as has more or less been the trend in the past weeks.  Although I wish that all students would be interested in this work, I’m not disappointed that they’re not coming; the ones that do show up seem to want to be there.  However, there is still an underlying tone of complaint and frustration regarding ‘having’ to come to seminar, or ‘having’ seminar period, among those that do show up.

Midway through the seminar, we put the students into groups and had them think about the project they might want to create.  It took them about five minutes to gather up in their groups outside, as if they were anchored to their seats, and someone had to drag them to work.  Once outside, a complaint was voiced: “How am I supposed to come up with a solution to these problems in ten minutes?”  Do your best, we responded.  Use your time productively.  Over the course of the next thirty minutes, I heard a lot of laughing, and a fair amount of conversation of things unrelated to the topic.  Upon our return to the classroom, when asked to share, three students spoke up.  When ideas were presented, there was laughter and lightness when addressing issues of poverty, underserved urban youth, and women’s empowerment. 

            By that point, the feeling had already begun to arise in me: what a drag it was for them to be in this foreign country and study these issues; what a miserable life.  The lightness with which the themes were spoken about tipped me over the edge.  I battled inside myself for the next ten minutes while listening to the students speak.  Do I share my feeling?  I knew that if I shared my feeling, it would elicit a negative response from the students.  They would feel attacked, and as they’ve shown throughout the rest of the year, they would deflect the criticism back to the giver.  Instead of using the comment as an opportunity for self-reflection and growth, they would close up and push back.  I would become the enemy once again.  How many days would the mean looks, ignoring, and audible-yet-under-the-breath negative remarks last this time?

            This is one internal struggle that I’ve faced this year as a teacher:  the risk of becoming the bad guy at the cost of encouraging or modeling positive internal growth.  With this particular group of students, I have had to face this struggle time and time again this year.  It’s been a hard lesson: being a teacher doesn’t always mean being friends with your students.  It’s even more difficult given that these students are my community; I have to travel around with them for seven and half months.  Given that, it’s nice to have friends from the student body.  It’s a lot harder when people are angry with you…

The second struggle I had during those ten minutes of presentation had to do with what I’m learning about being a good teacher: balancing paradox.  Part of our liberating pedagogy is about meeting the students where they are.  This means that if they’re not ready to be somewhere, mentally or emotionally, one can’t force them there.  Parker Palmer, in his book The Courage to Teach, speaks of paradox in pedagogical design.  He suggests that in the ideal classroom, the space should be “bounded and open”, and “hospitable and charged”.  How could I express my feelings to the students about the disrespect shown to all those people whom these issues affect while not making them close up?  How could I talk to the students about how privileged we are to travel the world, studying these issues from a safe enough distance where we can make light of these situations, while at the same time honoring that they’re just not there yet, not ready to take these issues seriously?

Paulo Freire and Ira Shor suggest in their book A Pedagogy for Liberation:

“The liberating educator can never manipulate the students and cannot leave the students alone, either.  The opposite of manipulation is not laissez-faire, not denying the teacher’s directive responsibility for education.  The liberating teacher does not manipulate and does not wash his or hands of the students. He or she assumes a directive role necessary for educating.” (516)

Balancing my mental/emotional health with the desire to lead the students.  Balancing the paradox of teaching: pushing students to grow while meeting them where they are.

In the end, I had to listen to my inner voice.  The feeling was strong enough in me to have some physical effect: I felt myself shaking, adrenaline beginning to pump inside me as if readying myself for battle.

The outcome was as predicted, but I didn’t stick around long enough to hear the backlash against me.

Palmer writes:

“Good education may leave students deeply dissatisfied, at least for a while.  I do not mean the dissatisfaction that comes from teachers who are inaudible, incoherent, or incompetent.  But students who have been well served by good teachers may walk away angry – angry that their prejudices have been challenged and their sense of self shaken.  That sort of dissatisfaction may be a sign that real education has happened.” (94)

In these times, the times I’m afraid to go back out and interact with the group, I have to trust the words of Palmer.  I have to trust that I’m providing good education, regardless of the consequences.  I need the support of others to help me overcome my self-doubt, the doubt that is at once critical to my growth and also debilitating to my confidence: another paradox in which I live, and must learn to balance. 

In our program leader training last August, we had the rest of the leaders and staff fill in the blank to the following statement during one practice seminar:  To be human is _________.   One of my fellow leaders responded with “to live in paradox”.  Never have I felt more in agreement.

A Story of A Story

The truth about stories is that’s all we are.

-Thomas King

There is a note in one of my journals.  It’s scribbled in blue ink at the top of one of the lined pages, without a date, but I know it’s about a year old.  It reads: ‘imagined stories.'  It refers to the narratives that we humans are so adept at creating in our minds about our identities and our social realities.  In particular, this note speaks to the stories that we create, perhaps around one off-hand comment a friend made one day.  Perhaps this comment made our minds spin, and, like great novelists, we built a story around this comment:  "this person thinks this about me, because of this reason," so on and so forth.  This story, now a reality at least in our minds (and how easily we convince ourselves that it is indeed the reality), then shapes our next interactions with that person.  Maybe we shy away from this person the next time we see them.  Maybe we don’t speak as much, fearful of what this person already ‘thinks’ about us.  Maybe we speak differently.  Maybe we approach this person with fear now, or contempt, or indifference.  Perhaps this interaction then shapes all the subsequent interactions we’ll have with this person. 

Our new reality is thus shaped by an imagined story.

We live and learn by our stories and in our stories.  Stories are the mental architecture for the choices we make on everything from our destinations abroad to whom we’ll befriend and how we’ll use our time.  Most of our stories are unconsciously held.  For the most part, we simply live the stories that have been planted in us by parents and peers, and by the powerful images of wealth, power, fun, and beauty that bombard us daily.  As ones with the capacity for mindful choice, we also plant stories in ourselves.  We construct assumptions and expectations that mark our lives and give certain meaning to our global learning, for better or for worse.

- Richard Slimbach

Slimbach, author of Becoming World Wise: A guide to global learning, takes the idea of the story a step further.  Not only do stories shape our interactions with each other, stories shape our perspectives of the world.  In the context of his book, Slimbach claims that the stories of our family, our culture and our nation shape our outlook on life, and thus to a high degree, our interactions with other cultures. 

As a program leader on a global gap year, this idea could not ring more true.  Daily, as we meet, live, and work with people spanning the continents, and as we discuss an issue so embedded in stories as is ‘development’, our students are confronted with the stories that have been planted in them for the past eighteen years.

Development is only a word.  Some of the words that come to define it: growth, change, progress.  These words hold no particular value, but our stories give them value.  Growth becomes economic.  Change becomes industrial.  Progress becomes modern.  As we bump up with people from different families, different cultures, and different nations, we begin to see that reality is only our reality; that our reality is only our perspective; that our perspective comes from our story. 

Now in Ecuador, our group of global students is studying issues related to our environment.  In one of our seminars, it was revealed that the mindset leading to the industrial patterns of production and consumption came from an era in which there were at least 5 billion less people.  Forests seemed endless.  Places seemed empty.  Resources, it seemed, would never run dry.

We now know that this is not true. 

Forests, it seems are not endless, and we can actually impact an ecosystem so much that forests may not grow back there.  Empty places, places for the taking, are actually inhabited by people all over the world.  These empty places are actually places where people collect food, building material, and medicine, and where people may live seasonally.  Resources, it seems, are running dry: we have severely depleted the oceans fisheries, one of our once boundless sources of ‘free’ protein; clean, fresh water is ever harder to come by; fertile, arable land has now become quite infertile.   

We now know that this, the idea that nature is a boundless, never-ending provider of all things we need, that we humans can not detrimentally impact this endless fountain, is not true.

And yet we continue to live as if it is.

Al Gore, in An Inconvenient Truth, forms two equations:

Old Habits + Old Technologies = Mostly Predictable Consequences

Old Habits + New Technologies =  ?

Our mindset was not only framed by what seemed like our environmental reality, it was framed in our spiritual and ethical, individual and collective conscience.  Manifest destiny gave North American settlers the internal motivations to conquer the ‘wild,’ and to civilize the ‘savages’. 

Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael, paints us a picture of two competing narratives, one of a culture of Takers, the other of a culture of Leavers.  An attempt perhaps to reveal to a modern and dominating culture the destructive environmental impact that our story is enacting on this planet, he tries to dig to the roots of our story in order to help us see what shapes our decisions as a culture of Takers:

Every story is based on a premise, is the working out of a premise…Your entire history with all its marvels and catastrophes, is a working out of this premise. The world was made for man.  If the world was made for us, then it belongs to us and we can do what we damn well please with it. 

In a small side story, Quinn has a jellyfish describe its story.  Creation and evolution, it just so happens, ends with the jellyfish. 

How would it change our everyday decisions if our story was such that we humans were not the pinnacle of creation?  That the plant and animal species that inhabit the many ecological niches in which we also live were our partners on this earth?  That we were to share this home with them?  That our environment, living and non-living, and the resources it provides, was not strictly to be used, but perhaps to be cared for and shared? 

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people.  Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world.  But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as your does, they will live at odds with the world.  Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world.  And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will be bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.

   - Quinn, Ishmael

The truth is, most of us live unaware of our stories.  As Slimbach says, “Most of our stories are unconsciously held”.  We do what do, we buy what we buy, we live how we live, unaware of the story that shapes our every single decision. 

Is the world ‘bleeding to death at our feet’? 

If so, why?  What story do we live by that allows that?  

Who/What feeds us this story?

What can we do to change it?

To change the world requires that we change our consciousness, the stories we live by.  Look at the lives of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Joan of Arc, or Helen Keller – those who lived from and for something that reached beyond themselves.  One quality seems to stand out above all:  a steadfast vision.  Despite opposition and personal limitations, they were able to firmly connect their personal interests to a future expectation of a more just and humane world…

Vision is an act of seeing, an imaginative perception of what should and could be.  It begins with dissatisfaction – even indignation – over the status quo, and it grows into an earnest quest for an alternative.  Global learning that serves the common good faces the world as it is and declares, ‘This is unacceptable – the despair, the dispossession, the exploitation, the contempt for human dignity – there must be another way.’  Then it dares to dream.  ‘Nothing much happens without a dream,’ declares Robert Greenleaf.  ‘And for something great to happen, there must be a great dream.  Behind every great achievement is a dreamer of great dreams’ (2002, p. 16).

   - Slimbach, Becoming World Wise

Everyday, I struggle to become aware of the stories that I create in my mind, based on my insecurities, about how people feel about me.  Everyday, I aim to become conscious of the stories that I weave, such that I may separate them from what has really happened, what is really happening, and approach people, and life, with more presence, more love, and less illusion.

I dream of authentic interactions with those around me, and I dream of authentic interactions with my home, this one Earth. 

What is your dream?

Pulling The Loose Thread

The flicker of fire coming from the lighter faintly illuminates the large interlocked stones that line the hallway of the elaborate entrance to Angkor Wat.  The light is just enough to see where we’re headed while also creating shadows that follow us through the ancient passageways.  While most visitors at this pre-dawn hour wait outside this 12^th century Khmer temple ruin in the hopes of capturing that picturesque vacation photo – sunrise colors cast behind the jagged spires of the temple, the lotus-filled pond reflecting a mirror image of an awe-inspiring scene – I and two other explorers creep through this ancient Hindu, then Buddhist, worship house. 

Our bodies hold a mixture of adrenaline and fear.  It’s exciting to be walking through these old halls; where yesterday, throngs of people filled the hallways and courtyards, now the only noise is our footsteps and the squeaks of bats flying in the dark above us.  It’s also a bit creepy; as I pass by headless stone sentries tucked into nooks along the hallway, suddenly appearing from the shadows, my mind wanders to imagine the activities taken place here over the past 900 years and the spirits that might be lurking about.

Through the entrance, into the main courtyard but still outside and just below the main temple, sky reappears above us.  I’m grateful for the space around me.  The sky is clear and still dark enough to see the stars.  It’s quite a view looking up, just beyond the spires, so close now, into the night sky.  It is warm; it’s amazing how much the stone surrounding us has created insulation from the cooler air outside the complex.  Despite there being no ceilings here, the stones beneath and around us have captured enough heat from the intense tropical daytime sun to provide a comfortable warmth well into the next morning. 

I find an old stone, a fallen piece of this ancient ruin, gathered together in a pile with some fifty others in one of the corners of the courtyard.  I sit, taking in the silence.  Even these fallen stones still show the work of the stonemasons, the intricate patterns and shapes etched into the sides of the rock.  The stone serves as a gateway for me, a connection to the past, and I’m awed that I am able to so freely connect with it, that it is not behind some glass in a museum or better protected onsite.  As I sit, I try to imagine the worker who chipped away at the stone and what that day was like.  Did they imagine someone sitting here, so many years later?

It is a special thing, to be able to enjoy this space, usually so filled with light, people, and noise, all to myself.  I sit until the sky begins to brighten, the stars begin to fade, and people start to slowly shuffle in. 

Angkor Wat Sunrise

The next morning, I am sitting in a café in Siem Reap town, the main hub for the many tourists that come to this part of Cambodia to visit Angkor Wat.  Of the many restaurants, cafes and bars that line Pub Street, the usually busy nighttime hotspot for visitors to find international food and some cheap alcohol, I choose a small place that boasts a socially conscious mission.  Joe to Go, the narrow two-story café with good food and a long history of decent coffee, is one of two entrepreneurial businesses that financially support The Global Child, a local nonprofit whose aim is to give Cambodian kids who would otherwise be begging for money on the streets the opportunity of an education. 

As I sit sipping on my Americano, watching the diverse array of travelers walk by on the street beside me, I write about my experience in the temple the day before.   A middle-aged man with no legs in a wheelchair comes in to the front patio where I’m sitting.  He’s selling books.  There’s a sign in front of the books written on a loose piece of paper.  It says something about how he’s a victim of leftover landmines from the war.  It is not the first time I’ve been put in this situation since being in Cambodia.  He’s distracting me from my writing.  I say “no thank you” and continue to look at my computer screen.  He eventually wheels himself away. 

Ten minutes later an older man walks in.  He’s only got one arm; the other is cut off at the shoulder.  With his remaining arm, he holds out a ratty hat by the bill, asking for some money.   I am starting to get annoyed by these ‘distractions.’  I look at him the eyes, trying to recognize his unique humanity, politely refusing his request.  The damage has been done though.  I can no longer think about my temple wanderings.  Trying to get back into the scene with the dimly lit hallways, the only thing that bubbles up into my mind is the emerging underlying story of my visit to Cambodia. 

Just four days before, our group had visited Choeung Ek outside of Phnom Penh, just one of many ‘killing fields’ that served as a slaughtering site and mass burial grounds for the 2-3 million people that were killed during the late 1970s Khmer Rouge regime.  As you walk around the grounds, bones and shrouds of cloth still lay in the dirt, rising up due to recent rains.  On the audio tour player, you hear the stories of survivors and perpetrators:  kids torn from their families, and witnesses to intense brutality; kids torn from their families and forced to commit horrendous atrocities.  Later in the day we visit Tuol Sleng, a former schoolhouse turned prison and interrogation center, in the center of the city.  Portraits of the men and women that passed through these cement cells on their way to the killing fields fill room after room after room.

            In the capital city of Phomn Penh, amputees claiming war survivor status sell books and other odd trinkets.  You might walk by them on your way to a sunset cruise along the Mekong River.

Siem Reap is no different.  You are confronted with beggars on every corner of the busy streets that light up with florescent lights at night and serve as a virtual ‘western’ town; where the only Cambodians are those serving your Mexican food or fish and chips.  Tuk tuk drivers are only too willing to offer you drugs or the company of young Cambodian women.

 As we toured Angkor Wat, I got to know our guide a bit.  He was born in 1979, the last year of Pol Pot’s regime.  He doesn’t know what month he was born in: his father died during the war, and he was separated from his mother and sister soon after birth.  Raised by some monks in a temple in the countryside, he doesn’t know what happened to his mother.  His sister lives far away.  This information is not part of the normal slew of facts he normally tells when guiding through these ruins.  It is hidden underneath the surface of this tropical tourist haven. 

It seems too easy to visit this country and not confront the underlying story of violence, oppression, pain and injustice.  As you are bussed from one hotel to the next, eat in one café after another, and visit world heritage sites and traditional dances, you remain in some illusion of reality, a theme park showcasing the beauty of this peaceful, exotic land and peoples. 

But the signs of a different reality are everywhere, if you choose to open your eyes and scratch just beneath the surface. 

My annoyance, I quickly recognize, has nothing to do with these people disturbing me from my journaling, asking for money.  My annoyance comes because they are confronting me, asking me to look at something that is filled with violence and pain.  They are asking me to deal with the questions of why this genocide happened here.  They are pushing me to question my current role in it all, as a tourist just passing through, feeding money to those that have enough power and resource to offer me something I might want in return.  How does my presence here contribute to these peoples' liberation, their domination, their pain, their sadness, their freedom?

I finish my breakfast and pay the bill.  The man in the wheelchair might have appreciated even a quarter of what I just paid for that breakfast.  I leave the cafe.  The sun is now high in the sky shining brightly, but my day is a bit gloomier.