A personal breakthrough
I had a huge breakthrough this weekend with some work and personal priorties that has made a huge difference in getting some stuff done that I was feeling overwhelmed by and which, along with a conversation I had with a girl in a class I'm taking, gives me some very important insight into struggles that kids have in school.
The breakthrough was that I have felt perpetually overwhelmed by a long to-do list that a whole host of people - parents, administrators, other teachers, students - seem to perpetually add to, often, in the case of the administrators and other teachers - without any real input from me about whether the priorities are manageable for me or not. I've tried talking about it with administrators, but often to no avail. It's a problem that all of the teachers I work with struggle with, but I've been looking to both resolve it and be honest about it with administrators, two significant departures, it seems, from my conversations with them.
And finally this weekend, I seem to have made a significant breakthrough. And one that completely illustrates the foolishness of trying to intimidate our way through important priorities, with adults as well as with kids.
The problem I've been having is that there is always far more things on my to do list than I can ever seem to get done at any particular time. And while I was trying to get my head wrapped around that and the priority and time management and organization that I have improved light years on this year, I was perpetually getting really intimidated by the list. This goes for personal stuff at home and in my own life - cleaning, finances, personal priorities and errands - as it does for professional priorities. It's swamped me and had me feeling terribly overwhelmed and without really understanding what the problem was, and learning very slowly how to come to terms with real time and resource and energy limits and do the work one thing at a time.
And yet I was still feeling overwhelmed, which was blocking me from feeling a sense of real control or real satisfaction or seeing a clear and substantial light at the end of the tunnel (I've had faith, the entire time, that as I learned as much as I was learning about managing my priorities and my life - and I have been learned tons, in the last year especially - that I would get it figured out. But now I know what it's going to take to get me there much more).
The big breakthrough was not just learning to write everything down, to write appointments and as much down in my carefully looked after planner as possible, to keep my papers and office and life organized, to take time to do this all a little at a time rather than all in one fell swoop when a deadline creeped up on me, and to stop burning myself out and making myself a grumpy teacher by burning all my candles at both ends. These were all lessons and more that I learned this year as matters of habit and not just matters of abstraction.
The big breakthrough was to stop feeling intimidated by the big list and to do each priority one thing at a time. Now, I need to clarify. The big breakthrough was not to just do one priority at a time, which was a big lesson I learned earlier this year.
The big breakthrough was learning not to feel intimidated by all of the priorities I had to get accomplished, in my personal life as well as in my professional life. Focussing on doing one priority at a time helped me break down each thing on the list into much more manageable chunks that helped me see how everything could get done and that I could even play a manageable catch-up on some stuff I've fallen behind on, given a commitment to getting each thing done in more manageable, realistic chunks.
But the big breakthrough, ironically, for all of the intimidation that at least one former advisor and every administrator I've ever worked with (this job is my first professional job; every other job I've had have been jobs where you do the work you're told, like in junior high or middle school or high school, but which you are not ultimately responsible for completed projects) was learning to not be intimdated by the big list, to keep track of and organize and schedule all of my priorities meticulously (something that I think I've gotten very good at and that I think, within a year, I should be a serious pro at, meaning at the level of some of the more organized managers and neatfreaks and anal-retentive professionals who have always intimidated me a little, with their abilities as much as with their personalities, but who do keep their stuff organized, something that has always been impressive to me even as I have scoffed at it out of a lack of understanding of just how important keeping my life and my priorities organized and managing them well).
And as I think about my experience with this and about a conversation I had with a girl on Saturday in a class I'm taking about her feelings of being intimidated by school and academic learning, I completely understand why a lot of kids blow off school, now.
Like me, if this girl is right, which I think she is, many of them feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the work. And without a life raft to pull them out of that ocean of feeling overwhelmed - which can only come with the lesson learned, not just with teacher direction - they begin to intuitively learn to not be intimidated by the work and by the teachers, just as I've been doing. Often trying to learn to not be intimidated looks like blowing off the work. And sometimes it does involve blowing off the work. But, ultimately, the lesson involved is learning how to do the work out of a sense of self-discipline and self-direction without, in my case, feeling intimidated by all of the million things to get done and the million ways you can think to improve them. But the bottom-line, for me, at least, was that I cannot not concentrate and get the work done when I'm feeling overwhelmed or intimidated by it. Or, at least, I cannot concentrate nearly as well or as for long as if was not feeling so frustrated with it, perpetually.
That's why it's ironic that you have people trying to intimidate you or reintimidate you. Because the whole point when people do this is to not feel intimidated.
I remember in grad school have a distinct time in my studies and my life when I decided that I was tired of being scared. Of professors, of my workload, of politics and the law (which seemed a really nasty place to operate, and is far nastier today than it was when I was in school), of work life and the job market, of financial issues, of all of it. I was tired of being afraid of all of the high stakes issues in my life, after struggling with pressures of both those priorities and resolving important policy matters in my own mind and the consequences all of this had for mine and Brandi's relationship and then losing that relationship, which was more important to me than all of these things.
And today, I think I'm finally getting past all of the fear, as much a possible. And, ironically, it was all the fear and the intimidation and the feeling intimidated that was blocking up the learning that needed to take place to get to resolution on a lot of these issues.
I never fail to be amazed how often this happens. How often the fear blocks up the learning, which is what was needed in the first place. And yet how often a huge barrier to solving so many problems is the fear and intimidation and pressure imposed on people, like me, presumably to get to a resolution. And yet no matter how long the pressure tends to undermine rather than facilitate resolution, how long its proponents will maintain their advocacy of it.
The Middle East peace process is the best example of this counterproductivity that I can think of. Militants use terrorism to pressure for favorable conditions for an Israeli withdrawal. All Palestinians, Hamas and Fatah and all of the many independent Palestinians in the region, presumably want a safer, freer (of Israeli occupation, at least), more culturally and economically strong and vibrant, more respected, more self-respecting and contributing Palestine. All of which need space for engagement, discussion, debate, and learning. And yet it is all of the violence and terrorism and political pressure imposed by pressure tactics like terrorism that keeps Palestine in such shambles and at war with Israel.
It's a tragic situation, where the people most responsible for the problem refuse to take responsibility for fear of looking weak and for fear of losing their leveraging power, and for fear of being prosecuted for the murder of all of the people they have killed in the name of their cause.
In the West, we have a similar but less pronounced problem where the people most responsible for the pressure and arm-twisting that is persistently undermining resolution to so many important issues, including important security issues, liberals and conservatives among them and most people, not just a few, who rally and cheerlead such efforts, very much like in Palestine, foolishly believing that such tragedy and counterproductivity have somehow accomplished more than they clearly have not, all on the premise that enough muscle will solve a problem without ever considering if that premise is true or not, especially given the plethora of evidence that it is not true, but with a broad number of people of all kinds of authority all over the world still acting as it is more true than it is, they continue to advocate the muscle.
The only way out of it is to see the failures more honestly. And to do that means to end the denial and talk about the failures more honestly, which the pressure and the intimidation often blocks up and undermines, as well.
And in my life, and I am finally getting one area of my life where I have felt intimidated organized and under control despite and often being undermined by the efforts to intimidate me into shape, rather than facilitated by them.
And the best thing I can do for the cause of ending this sad, failed, foolish myth of muscle over mind or muscle independent of well developed thought about its use is to call it out for its failures as often as possible until the message becomes clear that it does not work.
Melissa and I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, this weekend, while I cleaned the apartment on Saturday, and it is amazing to me two themes of that story: how far we have come since our most primitive, unevolved days of as predators and aggressive primates, and how little we have learned in that same time, about the failure of aggression to solve so many of our problems. The reason why reducing aggression is such an important goal for pscyhological health and individual and cultural progress is because it so rarely solves problems we want it to solve, so often creates them and worsens them, and how often we fail to recognize that fact because we are too busy using the same strategy, uncritically, no matter how often it fails and no matter how much it bullies and intimidates people, in the meantime, undermining bonds of trust and love and mutual respect and responsibility and learning which are the building blocks for accomplishing more of our goals.
Realistically, there are still important places where aggression and force must be used, to deal with the clear and physically dangerous aggression of others, in particular, but we are going through a very serious period of cultural and political regression around this issue, right now, rationalizing its persistent and overwhelmingly counterproductive overuse and abuse, and not taking responsibility or account for how much it has failed to achieve our goals.
There are limits to power, as my first book will argue, and as an article I read this weekend about the frustrations of Democrats in Congress to achieve their priorities rightly argued, no matter how much we might fantasize otherwise.
The good thing is that in a more liberal democratic society, there is more open, honest reflection, discussion, debate, and room for acknowledgement for such an idea. And all of the failure, right now, is an opportunity for us to learn the lesson.
In my own life, lessons that I've been working at learning for quite a long time, now, are getting learned despite all of the fear and intimidation I've both felt that I've had people try to use to foolishly motivate me to learn and to get priorities accomplished. And, ironically, it is so much of the fear and intimidation that creates so many of the problems we seek to resolve, rather than solving them. And this is one of them.
Now I've got work to do:).
Love,
Ben
