Challenges

I had this English teacher my Senior year of high school. She didn’t write essential questions on the board every day or pass out a Learning-Focused graphic organizer for every class discussion. But you could just feel that she loved it when she would talk about a text, and she made her students want to love it the way she did. Now, I am certainly not saying that essential questions and backwards design are not useful approaches to teaching. They are. But let’s be honest, nobody ever says, “I got into teaching because I just really love graphic organizers. I’m super passionate about Venn Diagrams.” 

This teacher was alway doling out poems that hit home to a bunch of narcissistic AP seniors. Poems about making your life mean something and seizing life while it was still fresh and green and youthful. There was one in particular that seemed to be so poignant on the cusp of my college life. It’s “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver.

“Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

At the time, I took the poem as a challenge that I had already passed. Go to college. Get an English degree. Get a job. Be awesome. Boom. Done. Failure was absolutely not possible. 

Now at the end of college with no real jobs in sight, this poem haunts me. I tried to put it away out of sight, but it keeps popping up when I least expect it. Everything reminds me of it. I’m sorry, Mary Oliver and Senior English teacher. I failed this challenge. When I close my eyes at night, the words, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” play in my head over and over again. 

So I force myself to reread it with new eyes and a new heart. I have to see that it may be a challenge, but not the kind of challenge I thought it was. It’s not challenging the reader to succeed. The challenge is much more difficult than that. It’s a challenge to be idle and blessed. To kneel in grass and stroll through fields. Nobody is going to give you an award or a paycheck for strolling through a field. Maybe the best things for us don’t need the recognition of others. Some things are just good for your soul.

School gave my life a purpose for 17 years. It’s difficult to know that though I made good grades, I have little to show for it. I thought that being a college graduate would give me even a little feeling of worth. But it doesn’t. Being a graduate is infinitely less fulfilling that being a student. There is no grading system in “the real word.” How am I suppose to know that I am on the right track? Who is going to tell me I made it? All of these things are solely up to me now. I have to make a huge paradigm shift when nothing about my post-grad life seems to be going accordingly to plan. So while I haven’t found my answer to the question of what to do with this one wild and precious life, I am willing to accept the challenge.