intend
“...this is not a case of people who have, you know, cake in the refrigerator and are very good at resisting opening the refrigerator to eat the cake. These are just people who don’t have cake in the refrigerator.” Shankar Vedantam on Hidden Brain, “Creatures of Habit: How Habits Shape Who We Are - And Who We Become”
As a young teacher, I heard a story about Madeleine Sophie Barat, founder of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, that profoundly shaped my approach to teaching. In a convent school, a young nun presented a student to Sophie, seeking a just punishment for running a finger through the icing of a cake that was put out for a celebration later in the day. Instead (and I imagine to both the young nun’s and the student’s surprise), Sophie reprimanded the young nun. How, she reasoned, could the student resist the delicious temptation laid out by the young nun?
The obvious lesson to teachers was caution - from jumping to conclusions, from overreacting, from treating children like they were adults - but the story, like any good fable, had a deeper, less-easily-revealed moral. My job wasn’t just about anticipating the choices that my students might make and to preparing them for those choices and their consequences. It was my job to give them good choices to make, and I had a tangible starting point: my candy stash. See, I’d been puzzling about why students were raiding the bowl of chocolate on my desk while I was out of the room, a puzzlement that reflected my assumption that students were both well-mannered and capable of mature restraint. My students were well-mannered, but, like the young nun’s cake, set out too early, my stash was a distraction. So I moved it to a low desk drawer. I joked with students that they should never assume they’re entitled to a piece of candy, that a piece or two was an outgrowth of a lovely conversation. To inquiries from students like, “Mr Hulseman, can I have a piece of chocolate?” I’d respond, “I’m doing well, thanks. How are you? So glad you stopped by for a chat.” Then we’d giggle our way through a few cliché conversational phrases, I’d open the drawer, and they’d be on their way, quickly unwrapping a Dove mini on the way out of my classroom.
But then, within a few weeks, my students flipped the paradigm. Instead of using chit chat for access to the sugar, they pursued chocolate as an excuse to have a conversation. One needed to vent about her homework load. It’s too much…I don’t think I can do it. One was frustrated by the neverending drama in the ninth grade. I’m just…over it. One wasn’t getting much sleep, and, exhausted, instead of emotionally melting down amidst her classmates went in search of some chocolate. She took a while to select a piece from the drawer and unwrapped it slowly while she eased into the chair adjacent to my desk. And I asked, Why aren’t you getting much sleep?
Each time the chocolate drawer opened, I wondered what would spill out. I heard stories of deep pain and mild frustration. I heard examples of unkindess, unawareness, injustice. Over the years, the chocolate drawer prompted interventions for students who were harming themselves, calls home to get a conversation going or to give parents a heads-up about an incident, and facilitated conversations between students and teachers to get everyone on the same page. My only intent had been to make students a little more mindful about other people’s chocolate stashes, but I stumbled into an essential tool for building relationships with students and creating a safe space for them to name their struggles and concerns.
I stopped setting “New Year’s Resolutions” partly because the practice was so cliché (I often despise being predictable) but mostly because, for me, those bold, ambitious, hopeful assertions of personal growth dissipated into little drops of self-disappointment before MLK Day. I recognize that articulating and pronouncing specific objectives to pursue, steps on a path toward happiness or self-realization, is meaningful for others, but, for a few reasons, I think we’re doing it wrong. For one thing, we popularly characterize the practice as setting “resolutions.” It starts a year by fixating on discrete ends. Any experience, relationship, or avenue of possibility along the way that doesn’t contribute to one’s resolutions is, as they say, chopped liver.
For another, New Year’s Resolutions carry with them a kind of arrogance. Not quite the hubris of Greek myth, they still suggest that the goals we impose on our lives are more important than other needs and desires that may arise, that one’s abstract objectives are more important than the lived experience one navigates. This kind of arrogance drags a person’s pride into the mix, so when resolutions dissolve with inaction, inertia, and fading interest, it’s not just our well- or not so well-formulated plans that suffer. Our pride, our sense of self, and our confidence take a blow. From this angle, resolutions serve less as guides and more as blinders.
Finally, the practice of imagining where we’ll end derails us from assessing and redefining where we’re starting. Instead of charting out timid practicalities or unrealistic fantasies of what a lap around the sun might induce, why not use the tabula rasa of a new year to reflect on the worlds we’ve built around us, the activities and people that shape us, the schedules and commitments that drive us? Instead of resolving to develop a skill out of a fixation on our personal deficits, why not curate guides and companions and a North Star that we want to follow? Instead of setting ourselves up for success or failure, why not focus on deepening our resilience, our relationships, and our ability to respond to the predictable and unpredictable twists of being alive?
Throughout 2020, social media was saturated with recommendations for books and articles to read, podcasts and personalities to follow, each enthusiastically and legitimately endorsing a particular set as essential to navigating the world, to understanding the experiences of this or that group, to effect meaningful change. Facing the avalanche of titles coming at me, I was overwhelmed - not just because of the daunting task of reading so much but at the diversity of frameworks, of worldviews, of definitions. I’ll gladly admit that I overthink pretty much everything, but I found myself drowning in the competing semantics and structures underlying authors’ thinking. I got caught up in my resolution to read as much as I could without clarifying my intent: what, exactly, will I do with all this? Listening to and responding to all these voices will, or should, change me…but into what?
I’ve been reading a lot lately. Well, not “reading,” per se. When possible, I listen to audiobooks. And not “a lot,” but more than I have for a very long time. I used to resent people who talked about the pleasure they derived from reading because reading is incredibly difficult for me. I think it is for many people, but because it’s such a fundamental skill, there’s a certain amount of shame that comes with admitting it. Even as I write this, I wonder whether I’ve just put a dent into my credibility. Somehow, I made it through high school without anyone noticing this struggle, either because I actively disguised it or because nobody cared enough to notice. This isn’t something I even got angry about until I started teaching. Weekly, my colleagues at each grade level met to talk about students - this one experienced success, that one is going through a rough patch, this one was behaving uncharacteristically…I saw the way my colleagues attended to students’ needs. They brought their own human experience and their expertise as educators to shape a refined and revealing lens for their students, and, applied as a team, when this lens revealed any hint of a pattern that might point to some unnoticed impediment we devised appropriate interventions with creative learning strategies or additional support. Often, in these meetings, I’d notice my distraction, my wandering back through my own experiences as a student and wondering why nobody noticed the things that I as a teacher would come to recognize as clear indicators of an unseen struggle.
So, I’ve been reading a lot lately, and I’ve found myself engaging a group of voices who seem to be speaking to each other, even responding to each other, like I’ve just stumbled into my fantasy Sunday morning talk show. They’ve been asking big questions, bigger questions than we usually allow ourselves to ask, and I’ve found myself slowly weaving their insights into a starting point for understanding myself, the world, and my place in it. Instead of pursuing a goal and collecting resources toward it, I intend to listen to these voices, to ask bigger questions, and to see how their insights can help me to anticipate what’s next - in my career, in my life, in our world. For me, this means, to return to Shankar Vedantam’s metaphor, not just avoiding the delicacies that will distract me from a discrete goal. It means stocking the fridge with ingredients that will spur better, more interesting, more nourishing intersections with the intent to develop…well, I’m not sure. It suddenly seems arrogant to define what skills I might polish or knowledge I might acquire from these insights, to tell these voices what I want from them. I hope they help me to cultivate openness and maybe even hopefulness, and if they point the way to a new or newly exercised skill, all the better. For now, though, I think it’s enough to say that my New Year’s Intention is to listen. There are myriad voices to listen to, but this is the dialogue I’m starting with.
In The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us, Richard O. Prum reclaims a significant thread of Darwin’s theory that was actively shelved because it didn’t resonate with social norms of the late 19th century and lays out the evidence to elevate the role of aesthetics in evolution. The ethical implications of this theory are potentially worldview-shattering - if we’ve misunderstood “natural law” all this time, then the foundation of Western ethics is in shambles. The questions that Prum poses reflect a pluralist outlook and anticipate the intellectual and social shift into the postmodern era.
Like The Evolution of Beauty, anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrove systematically dismantle their field and everything we’ve ever been taught about the development of civilization. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a fascinating re-telling of human history that escapes the paradise lost paradigm that has dominated Western thought, sets aside any assumption of inevitability (the notion that history could only have happened as it has happened), and highlights the ongoing impact of human agency.
I read (well, listened to) Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies during the summer of 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Menakem examines racism through the lens of trauma and body-centered psychology and provides a critical resource for understanding, attending to, and healing the trauma that each of us inherits.
One book that I did actually read in paperback format was Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race. Unlike many of the more academic titles that were highly recommended, Oluo makes plain the systemic injustice and institutional racism that characterize American culture through vignettes from her personal experience woven with supporting research. I think of the book like a candid conversation with a friend who is generous with her time and expertise and loving enough to tell me where I’ve fucked up, what I’ve inherited and how I’ve benefitted from a fucked up system, and how I can listen, respond, and do better.
Ever read a book and think, Damn, I wish I had written this? Well, Priya Parker wrote the book that I wish I had written. The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters spins insights from ritual theory, sociology, and the field of conflict resolution into a practical and systematic guide for creating culture. Parker’s approach applies to every size and type of gathering, from intimate dinner parties to enormous conventions, and I’ve been barking at everyone I know that this should be everyone’s summer reading, this is the manual for developing a more intentional culture.
I stumbled into the poetry of Rebecca Elson through Maria Popova’s blog. Elson was an astronomer and poet whose unique intersection of passions and experiences helped her craft elegant and wise verses. In a period of immense, global grief compounded by the loss of my parents and sister just a few years ago, I was lucky to find “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” a poem she wrote amidst her own struggle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and published in A Responsibility to Awe a couple of years after she died. I find myself returning to her words with each new loss.
And sometime it’s it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skills,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
