On Teaching as Letting Go

            In October of 2009 a group of Tibetan Monks came to MU to create a Mandala out of sand.  This involved spending 24 painstaking hours creating a beautiful work of art only to blow each carefully crafted image into the atmosphere never to be seen again.  I remember being fascinated by the practice.  “There is a lesson here for you,” I kept telling myself.  “Pay attention.”

            The symbolic act doesn’t require a whole lot of interpretation.  Nothing is permanent.  Don’t get too attached.  There is beauty in the now.  There is beauty in letting go.  The power is in the doing and not the finishing.  Change is inevitable. 

            I thought of my own weaknesses a lot during the three days these monks inhabited our campus.  I tried to tell myself that I could write even if no one read it.  I reminded myself not to hoard.  I questioned my own resistance to change, my instinct to dwell, my inability to let go.  I kept wondering the lesson, but really the lesson was there in front of my face.  I just wasn’t letting it into my heart. 

            This week has been hard.  In addition to the grief over losing a dear friend and colleague, I find myself pondering the inevitable shifting of relationships in all areas of my life.  I think of other coworkers who I have grown apart from, not by choice but by circumstance.  You go from literally knowing what they eat five days a week, what they wore each day, who is driving them crazy (both at school and at home), who is burrowing into their heart (again in both places) to catching up quickly while passing at the copy machine after a content or grade change -  or worse - as you bump into each other at a district meeting after a building shift.  Coworkers share an intimacy that is deeper and yet often more impermanent than many relationships that don’t even begin to scrape the surface the way the safe anonymity and shared existence of doing the daily grind in tandem allows. 

            More importantly, I find myself thinking of the students who come and go and the discomfort I feel with my comfort with these goodbyes.  There are few spaces like that of a classroom.  The people that inhabit it build and love and collide and negotiate in similar ways to families.  There becomes a shared history, a need to coexist.  As I read the plethora of stories both funny and poignant from my colleague’s former students, I find myself less emboldened by our impact and more saddened by the inevitable goodbyes necessary in the teaching world made apparent in these stories.  

            I feel this weighing on my heart especially this year as I get down to the final stretch with a group of children who have truly burrowed their way into my heart.  I am not sure what it is about this year.  I came very close to making the permanent switch out of the middle school classroom last year and into a college level position.  The affection I feel for these kids might be my heart’s way of making sure my brain doesn’t get disillusioned by my degree again. These children have been a gift, but the impending goodbye confuses me.  I usually understand the necessity of these temporary bonds, but today I find them troubling.  I find myself forgetting how this cycle I’ve experienced 18 years (another eleven when you count my college students) works.   I keep thinking back to my very first group of 6^th graders who I was lucky enough to teach as 6^th and 8^th graders.  A very small few occasionally touch base, but for the most part they belong to other teachers now.  It’s how it should be.  I accept it.  I miss them. 

            Teaching is blatant metaphor for those monks and that sand art.  We work so carefully for one, maybe two years with these little grains of sand.  We shape them.  We shift them.  We get to know them in such genuine ways.  We care about them deeply.  Then May comes and we must destroy the mandala.  I am not sure I get the lesson in all of this other than to say there is no other way.  The only way to play a part in over 2,500 students lives as my friend did is to create and move on, create and move on, over and over again, year after year. 

There is beauty in the now.  There is beauty in letting go. The power is in the doing and not the finishing.  Change is inevitable.