Focus on the Crocus

Gadi's Tagline, Caroline's Substack, and Saturday with a cat, a cold, and a strange thing in the park

The Tagline on Israel Update, my favorite podcast, is “As sane as possible under the circumstances.” I listen to Israel Update whenever I feel bored or lonely or sad, and Gadi making mistakes with English is my favorite part. On an episode I listened to today, he was trying to figure out the phrase “saber rattling” which led Mike Doran off on a tangent about how he got into an argument with a five year old who kept calling his toy light saber a light saver. Then Mike realized he was arguing with a five year old. If you want to hear the thrilling exchange, listen here.

For quite some time, I’ve subscribed to Caroline’s Talking to Myself. This is one of my favorite not always political Substacks. I loved her recent entry on focusing on the small pleasures in life instead of freaking out about things over which we have little control. I try to do this, and it is not easy.

Caroline faces insecurity in her job, read about it here, I do not want to presume to tell her story and she tells it very well. I sympathize, as I have lived with tons of insecurity for a very long time. There’s something about living with insecurity where at times it feels safer to just assume the worst than to actually hope for the best of the even vaguely okay. I did this for years and am only recently able to really open myself up to more positive possibilities.

True financial insecurity is not to be underestimated. It ruins your concentration, saps your impulse control, and erodes your will to live. People who don’t know if they can pay their bills on a regular basis sometimes behave in ways that are baffling to people who have never experienced this. We don’t always make the wisest decisions, and we sometimes seem to have a short fuse. It’s hard to plan when you can' barely see past the week or the month.

I have found several practices very helpful. First, meditation. I do zen meditation, but I also do a lot of just informal sitting, including kitty zazen, a deep meditation practice with my cat. The second is gratitude prayer. I thank G-d for my many blessings: my cat, my mother who is still with us and my dad who is with G-d in heaven, my step-mother (and for peace in her grief, which is fresh, as my dad died just over two months ago), my place to live, my close friends and my far away friends, and the skills and determination I have that has kept me alive and gotten me to this point. I have had a hard several years, facing illness, material insecurity, and the loss of people close to me. I’ve had dreams die, but they were replaced by different dreams.

Learning to appreciate the small things, as Caroline describes, is part of this gratitude practice. I find it especially helpful when I’m confronting difficult tasks or realities that I can’t change right now. For example, when I get on the crowded, loud and germ-filled city bus to go to work, I look out the window and try to be grateful that I can see the sights. I take a moment to be grateful that I have work, that I can physically do the job I do (which requires standing and walking for hours on end, projecting over screaming kids, and walking up innumerable stairs, sometimes while dodging children as they attempt to catapult themselves over anything that blocks their path to recess and/or lunch.) I’m grateful that the circumstances of my life, while not always what I had hoped or wanted or enjoyed, have given me a kind of empathy with urban school kids that most white well educated people don’t have. They may care or feel sorry for the kids, but they don’t get them the way I do. And the kids know it.

I never set out to become a teacher - I started subbing in 2018 when I just needed a job I could do while I was living with my mom in Reading, PA. I found out that I love it and I’m very good at it. Things happen in urban schools that shock suburban people. The violence, the noise, the total lack of respect for adults, authority and order, to name the most general. You could come out hopeless, or you could run screaming in the other direction. But I find the good in every day. That one moment when I get to teach a kid new words. The fun of teaching quotation marks by making air quotes around my ears and saying, “Think of it as you are quoting what you heard, so quotes = ears.” Then the kids put air quotes around their own ears and I imagine that years from now they’ll remember it.

Being able to say to a kid, “Look, this is really hard. I promise it will get better.” So few people are able to look the pain in the face and acknowledge it. When the kids feel like someone understands them and cares, whether I’m there for a day, a week, a month, or a year, it makes a difference. As one of my friends who teaches way bigger kids wrote me recently, “With teaching, you may not realize it, but every kindness you are giving them has infinite ripples.” It does.

I remember years ago I had taken over a classroom in Reading (inner city, almost entirely recent immigrants, literally 99% below the poverty level) at a high school for kids who had already failed out of the main high. They had issues. These kids had not had a teacher all year - and it was January when I walked in. This is unfortunately not all that uncommon. Teaching doesn’t pay enough, is too inflexible, and is too dangerous to keep enough good teachers in poor urban areas. Somebody fix that, please.

In one of my classes, there was a group of students who desperately needed to catch up on work, and I could help them if I could only get them to pay attention and work with me. But the leader of their group, a young woman of about seventeen, seemed determined to keep them busy *not* paying attention to the teacher. Eventually I asked her at the end of class if she could chat with me for a minute. She agreed.

I laid out the problem: the kids need to work to catch up, and I can get them there, but I need your help. I need the kids to focus for at least twenty minutes out of each class. Can we work together and make that happen?

Tentatively she said, “Okay, miss.” I could tell she was skeptical, but she was willing to try. Sure enough, she started to work with me and her friends followed. By the time the schools closed for the pandemic, they were caught up and making A’s.

Two years later I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts outside Reading. Sure enough, there was the young woman, working behind the counter! She recognized me and was so happy to see me. She asked if I remembered her and of course I did! I asked what she was doing now. She was in dental hygienist school and doing well, working at Dunkin to make some money. Set to graduate soon. She looked and seemed happy. She asked if I was still teaching and I said I was. She was glad to hear it.

Ripples. Things that matter. I don’t know what small thing will matter. Every time a kid asks nicely to go to the bathroom or get water, I say, “Sure, and thank you for asking so nicely!” I praise every tiny bit of pro-social behavior. I tell them, “You’re doing a great job today, I’m so proud of you.” I write notes home to their families that they were good. This matters so much to younger ones and even older ones.

I am exhausted at the ends of the days, and I binge listen to Gadi Taub on the weekends and sometimes spend hours in bed reading my Israel news and blogs. It’s a different world, and I dive into it when I leave work. The Substacks I read are also happy little pleasures.

I have a cold, but I’m grateful that I was strong enough to work through it. I’m not a fan of working when sick, but right now I don’t get paid if I don’t work, so being able to do it is mission critical. The schools are so filled with germs that we are all swimming in it.

I went for a short walk today, down to the park and the farmers’ market. There was a strange gathering of people wearing keffiyehs and standing in a circle. I saw they had a big banner that said something about genocide. I checked it out briefly, long enough to hear the speaker telling the small crowd to imagine their descendants in the center of the circle. It is always strange to see the white, pink-blue-purple haired, gender non-conforming residents of my neighborhood out in force to support a terrorist regime that would kill them, but I’ve gotten used to it. Until I can afford to move, it is where I am. I try to focus on the crocuses instead.

It’s how I stay as sane as possible under the circumstances.

Focus on the crocus.