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Feb. 18th, 2009 05:43 pmI was thinking in class today. I know, I should not admit to thinking, much less to thinking in class. What I was thinking about, though, was important.
We place limits on ourselves. Always. And there's a moment when we are about to reach beyond those limits and it is all almost too much altogether*. I see it in class quite often. There's a look on a student's face and I know that if I can get them to take that last step, their lives will be irrevocably changed.
I saw it today. Someone who wanted to write, who had always told stories, who has an abundance of words and an abundance of ideas - and who wrote something down for the very first time. There was a real terror in that moment and an even more real magic.
The terror in that moment of beginning was that it all might be irreversible. That there's no going back. That the dream of doing that thing (whether it's writing or dating someone or learning a foreign langauge) will have been greater than the reality.
The truth is, though, that the reality is always different to the dream and you can never tell if it's a good type of difference or a bad unless you take that step. Unless that blank paper contains your very first verse or you've booked that ticket for your first bit of travel overseas.
It made me think. Some of my blank pages were easy to write on (doing that PhD, making new friends). Some get written on despite myself (I never wanted to experience extreme bigotry). Some are so terrifying that they may never happen (getting married). But if I pull all those pages together, both the ones that are written on and the ones that are blank: that sheaf of papers contains the highlights of my life.
And that's why those blank pages are so very difficult and why my talented student hesitated a long minute before writing those first words. Those pages give us such power over our lives. We can change things within ourselves. We can ignore problems. We can do almost anything. With great power comes even greater fear.
I'm afraid something in me finds it fascinating that surpassing our limits should be something to be scared of.
*If my words or the shape of my ideas are a bit different to usual it's because I am breathing very shallowly. This is the normal effect of secondhand smoke on an asthmatic. It's proof I caught a bus to work today, in fact, because it means I had many lungfuls of very high quality secondhand bushfire smoke while I walked my couple of kilometres. There's not enough round anymore to colour the sky, but there is enough round to make breathing interesting. Which makes me think of those post-apocalyptic worlds where the sky is forever changed by the evil particles that drift through the air. People breath those particles. There's a story in that, though not for me or not for today. I can't face the thought of those major post-apocalyptic fights you get on movies being made real by having the hero and villain both having to stop regularly because of lack of oxygen to the lungs.
We place limits on ourselves. Always. And there's a moment when we are about to reach beyond those limits and it is all almost too much altogether*. I see it in class quite often. There's a look on a student's face and I know that if I can get them to take that last step, their lives will be irrevocably changed.
I saw it today. Someone who wanted to write, who had always told stories, who has an abundance of words and an abundance of ideas - and who wrote something down for the very first time. There was a real terror in that moment and an even more real magic.
The terror in that moment of beginning was that it all might be irreversible. That there's no going back. That the dream of doing that thing (whether it's writing or dating someone or learning a foreign langauge) will have been greater than the reality.
The truth is, though, that the reality is always different to the dream and you can never tell if it's a good type of difference or a bad unless you take that step. Unless that blank paper contains your very first verse or you've booked that ticket for your first bit of travel overseas.
It made me think. Some of my blank pages were easy to write on (doing that PhD, making new friends). Some get written on despite myself (I never wanted to experience extreme bigotry). Some are so terrifying that they may never happen (getting married). But if I pull all those pages together, both the ones that are written on and the ones that are blank: that sheaf of papers contains the highlights of my life.
And that's why those blank pages are so very difficult and why my talented student hesitated a long minute before writing those first words. Those pages give us such power over our lives. We can change things within ourselves. We can ignore problems. We can do almost anything. With great power comes even greater fear.
I'm afraid something in me finds it fascinating that surpassing our limits should be something to be scared of.
*If my words or the shape of my ideas are a bit different to usual it's because I am breathing very shallowly. This is the normal effect of secondhand smoke on an asthmatic. It's proof I caught a bus to work today, in fact, because it means I had many lungfuls of very high quality secondhand bushfire smoke while I walked my couple of kilometres. There's not enough round anymore to colour the sky, but there is enough round to make breathing interesting. Which makes me think of those post-apocalyptic worlds where the sky is forever changed by the evil particles that drift through the air. People breath those particles. There's a story in that, though not for me or not for today. I can't face the thought of those major post-apocalyptic fights you get on movies being made real by having the hero and villain both having to stop regularly because of lack of oxygen to the lungs.