Things I have to learn again and again

 Certain lessons I have to learn again and again. 

In 1994 went to a Project Adventure training in Michigan for Adventure-Based Counseling. One challenge was to get our entire group to cross a space on a rope swing without touching the ground and then all stand together on a small wooden platform, and to do this in thirty minutes. The obstacle, for our group, was getting people up on that rope swing. There were members who could not get their foot up to the knot, or who could not then lift themselves to stand on it. I got down on my hands and knees and told them to use me as an intermediate step. They were fearful that they were too heavy, or that my forty-two year old body was just too weak to support another person. Anyway, I insisted and we got about two-thirds of the group across before someone’s foot touched the ground and we had to start from the beginning.

Judging by how long it had taken us so far, there was clearly not enough time left to succeed. The group decided we should use the remaining minutes for the people who had not crossed yet to try the rope swing. They were most insistent that I get the opportunity. Could I tell them that swinging across twelve or fifteen feet would not afford me the rapture they thought it would? No, I could not. It had been a daunting obstacle for many of them and therefore a great achievement. I wasn’t going to minimize or disparage their accomplishment. I grabbed the rope and I swung across.

Astonishment. Epiphany. Several people simultaneously realized that if I could do this with such ease then we could approach the problem differently, sending me and a twenty-something guy back and forth to assist everyone. And we did. And we got the entire group across in the seven-or-so minutes we had left. Success.

But the revelation for me was that turning myself into a stoop wasn’t the only option I had in order to serve others. I could do this in ways that required less self-abasement. But self-abasement in service of others is a habit of thought as well as a habit of heart. I have had to learn that lesson over and over. And it has come as a revelation every time.

I have had to unlearn other, related, habits of abnegation, too. When I was seventeen I got home one evening after a long drive back from Toronto. I was surprised to find a large group of classmates crowded into my parents’ living room. They had been meeting to discuss next steps in the endless struggle to get our high school to treat us a human beings with opinions and preferences and - dare I say the word? - rights. They had decided that we should run a candidate for school board to speak for us during the upcoming elections. And they had voted on who should be that candidate. And their vote was completely split, a tie between P. and me. And they wanted me to break the tie.

It was an easy choice for me. It required no thought at all. Under what circumstances would I even consider voting for myself? The belief that one does not advance oneself - that one only accepts a trust like that when others choose it for you - was so deeply ingrained in me that I don’t think I was aware that it wasn’t universally held. Before I could vote, though, some of my supporters pulled me aside. They said that they preferred me and that they didn’t appreciate what they expected to be my rejection of their preference. And they pointed out that while I had not yet voted, P. had. They noted that P. voted for himself, that if our votes were cancelled I would have won. And they asked me to drop this stupid principle and support the majority. With some discomfort, I did. I did not regret that decision.

Forty years later I went to the superintendent of Bronx schools and announced that I was ready for a principalship. It was still hard. The little boy in me still held to the view that she should have been approaching me instead of the other way around, that I was being presumptuous and personally ambitious instead of acting to serve the greater good. But decades of experience and reflection made it a little easier. That August she offered me a brand-new school that suddenly needed a principal and I accepted that challenge and that trust. It was insanely hard. But I have never regretted that decision, either.

The brighter the flash of understanding, the more profound the depth of the insight, the more likely I will have to repeat it again tomorrow. In fact, my greatest bursts of sudden self-knowledge were the ones I suddenly couldn’t remember moments later. Our habits of mind and heart are written into us by early and repeated experience and by the words and deeds of our loved ones. We have guarded them relentlessly and looked away from them with great care. In fact, that habit of avoiding actual reflection and self-examination (as opposed to self-contempt or rehearsing our hurts) is probably our most ingrained habit. 

I try. 

But I know I will have to try again tomorrow.