Blues and grays and rays of sun

You know what was delightful?  On Wednesday, I got to sleep all the way in to 7am and it was glorious! I had to go back to the doctor for a routine blood test which they only do weekday mornings before you have eaten and they open at 8. So that meant I got to come to school a couple hours late...

Waking up at 7 was so decent, so humane (compared to my usual 5:30 or 5:45)!  The sun was already shining, the morning chill had been mitigated by said sun, people were out and about, life was present.  I have always felt a sort of silent solidarity for the other early risers that I usually see in the gray dawn of my morning commute - maintenance people, truck drivers, nurses, parents dropping off little ones at school or daycare before work, other teachers, people preparing for big events...  But it was nice to join the other folks for a day! The stores were open, morning radio programs had begun. Somewhat jealously, I wondered what subset of people had time to attend a Tai Chi class in the park on weekday mornings.

Once I arrived to work, with plenty of time before my next class, I stopped by the Teacher's Club to refill my coffee and have the cook make me nice gooey grilled cheese sandwich. It was a rare luxury to be able to operate within a flexible time frame. In teaching, your entire existence is plotted out minute by minute. There is no being late when all of your students are depending on you to unlock the classroom door and take attendance and get the gears going in order to set the daily routine into motion.

This unique Wednesday morning, I relished the feeling of reading the headlines in bed before getting up, without the pressure of knowing a bus would be waiting for me on the corner at exactly 6:46am and that I'd better hurry up and get my ass out of bed or I'll miss it. It was nice to dilly-dally. We teachers don't get to do that a lot. Our lives are about pressing on ahead, figuring out how we can makes things go more quickly, more smoothly, more efficiently, more like clockwork. It was nice to un-tether myself from the clock for a few hours.

The other delightful thing that day was a real live teachable moment!  Our new Social Studies unit is about resistance and revolution, and as students studied photos and images from segregation and the Civil Rights movement, it gave way to a really interesting and honest conversation. We talked about how to talk about race, and why it's difficult, and how words are important because they have the power to evoke specific meanings and feelings and entire time periods in history. The students also shared some moments where they had detected latent racism in their own lives. It was unplanned, and ended up superseding the Read Aloud I had planned, but it was one of those rare, cool, moments where you can see that the whole class is thinking, listening, being challenged, realizing or naming things that they are just beginning to understand.

Those were some highlights this week.

The not-so-delightful thing is this week is that I think I have been suffering from human contact withdrawal. To have Auntie J here for 2 weeks meant that there was someone to come home to to ask me how my day was, and to tell me about hers. And in the evenings she would gently nudge me when the 9 o'clock hour rolled around, fluffing up my pillows and asking me if I wouldn't like to crawl into bed and get cozy and aim for a good night's rest. Not to mention that she did laundry and dishes, and even discovered a way to get rid of my persistent toilet bowl ring stain! She also bought me a hair dryer. She took good care of me.

Having her here filled up my cup, but suddenly this week I'm back to filling up my own...
Teaching can be isolating. You're on your own.  Sure, you are around other human beings all day long, but the relationship is not exactly a socially fulfilling one when you are basically trying to control their actions, words and even their thoughts all day long. (Come to think of it, when people ask me what I do for a living, I'm going to start saying mind control.)

Once the day is done, you begin wondering, where are my friends? What is my life? Is everyone else having more fun than I am? Why has everyone else been able to develop seemingly close friendships with no trouble at all? Things that were so easy and simple back home, like calling up a friend in the neighborhood to out for a meal or a beer, here seem prohibitively complex.  When I get home, will my old friends have moved on without me? Will they be resentful that I am so bad at keeping in touch? And it's so strange -  have you ever noticed that when your mind has already started wandering down a path of gloom and doom, your brain tends to further betray you by conjuring up out of nowhere embarrassing things you said or did like 10 years ago, just to twist the knife? It would be nice to be able to control my own mind a bit more.

The truth is, these feeling aren't altogether unexplainable. It is the rainy season after all. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that I have ended up feeling a bit isolated, especially in the first week back to work after a week of vacation, and with the next long break a solid three months away.  At school, my classroom is physically pretty far away from most of the rest of the school - I'm kind of at the edge of campus. I don't have a teaching partner, and my schedule is different from most of the other elementary teachers. Besides that, at school, it's difficult to focus on anything beyond "What's next?"  Most days I don't stop working from the moment I arrive at 7:25am to the moment I'm running to catch the afternoon bus at 4. Which I admit is not an altogether healthy way to live. And then I go home tired, and sometimes keep working at home (though not as much as in the past, thankfully.) And then of course there's the whole living in a different country thing.  But I've been here six months. I would like to be adjusted already.

Now, I talk a a big game to the kids about using challenges as opportunities to learn and to stretch yourself. According to our curriculum, I am supposed to be teaching them about balance, which has never been my strongest suit. But I figured I should at least try following the advice I'd give to someone else if they came to me with the same complaints.  So I reluctantly decided to use today as an opportunity to pull up my big-girl panties practice some self-care.

I told myself that the good news, when it comes to the blues, is that there is a remedy. The remedy is knowing yourself.  My prescription is to get up and get out. Resist the temptation to numb out and watch television for the entire day, because it doesn't end up feeling too good in the end.  Instead, I went to yoga in the park, where they make you take the time to breathe and look inside yourself and realize what you're feeling. I had lunch with my Ecuadorian friend and her mom, and then drank coffee and took shelter from the rain with a couple of friends from school. (Oh right, I guess I do have friends. I had forgotten.) Then I picked up some groceries and came home and put on the mix of uplifting songs Rika sent me, and cleaned up the house and now I'm writing to you in order to express myself about my touch of the blues. I'm proud of me.

And I'd like to report that it is working. In yoga this morning I went ahead and admitted to myself that I was feeling lonely, and I put it out to the universe that I'd like to spend some time with other adult humans. And within a few hours the universe had responded with an invitation to go dancing tonight. Thanks, universe.

There's been a foggy, gray drizzle outside for several hours now and Pichincha volcano, the sentry outside my window, is almost completely obscured. But before I go ahead and put on my dancin' shoes, I'm going to close with some words from Mason Jennings from my playlist of uplifting songs from Rika. They are as follows:

Be here now, no other place to be
Or just sit there dreaming of how life would be
If we were somewhere better
Somewhere far away from all our worries
Well, here we are.

Be here now, no other place to be
All the doubts that linger, just set them free
And let good things happen
And let the future come into each moment
Like a rising sun

Sun comes up and we start again.

And it's all new today
All we have to say
Is be here now.

Sun comes up and we start again.