To Thine Own Self Be True

Last week Maui OnStage closed Elf the Musical. In one of the central musical numbers, “SparkleJollyTwinkleJingeley,” Buddy the Elf sings, “To thine own elf be true,” an allusion to the advice Polonius gives to his son Laertes in Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3:

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

The message is the same in either case—live authentically no matter what others think, and in both word and deed tell the truth about who you are.

I count this excellent advice, but I’ve struggled to live it in my own life. I’ve made a serious and grounded effort in recent months, and learned that (right now) I’m really bad at it.

To be fair, I’m bad at it because I’ve never really done it before, and (as with any skill) it takes practice to be true to yourself. It’s so much easier to do and be what others—especially those you respect and love—want than it is to do and be who you are, particularly when you fear the "real you” won’t be liked as well as the easygoing, uncomplaining, compliant “you” you’ve always been.

For someone like me—with decades of practice discounting his own worth and for all those years utterly dependent on the esteem of others—it is terrifying to assert yourself when it might not be what others want and you really like being liked!

It’s easier to keep up the pretense…

Easier, but dishonest. That’s what came to me this morning (although I have been trying to be true to myself in various ways for more than a year).

Polonius is saying that one must be true to oneself in order to be dependably “true” to (honest with) others. By always sacrificing my own desires in order to please others, I’ve lied to them about who I really was. I’ve deceived them—if they like me, they don’t like the real me, but rather the Stepford “me” I created for them to like.

I’m trying to assert myself more—to be authentically who I am, to do what I actually want to do and to not do what I don’t want to do—but I’ve been clumsy about it. It’s a new thing to me, of course I’ve been clumsy, and I’ve sometimes been strident rather than gracious. Doubtless I’ve hurt some feelings (although I never meant to), and I’ve likely given people the wrong impression as to why I’m suddenly doing things I previously didn’t and refusing things I previously accepted. All that is my responsibility…“clumsy” can explain it but not excuse it. If you are among those I’ve hurt, all unwitting, I apologize. And I’ll try to be clearer and classier in the future.

That’s not to say I’m going to go back to being the acquiescent, compliant guy you may have met a few years ago. I’ll find a easygoing, classy and considerate way to assert myself, but I’ll continue to assert myself. What I want and what I care about matter, and acting as though they don’t (or worse, hiding what I want and care about) does me a disservice while deceiving those around me.

The world doesn’t need anyone who becomes whatever others want—who lives down to others’ wishes—the world needs each of us to be “true,” even if “true” sometimes also means “contrary.” Conformity lends itself to mediocrity—it is in the blending of diverse natures that our world is made great.

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays (in my faith tradition, that would be “Merry Christmas!”)

Long-time readers may realize that the holidays often lead me to reflect on (and whine about) my circumstances, especially my relational circumstances. This year is, I think, different—I’ll still reflect on circumstances, but it’s like I’ve put on glasses in the proper prescription: my focus is clearer and I’m predisposed to see abundance rather than lack.

I’ve always allowed society to tell me if I’m “okay”—for years because (like so many others) I believed “society” knew best, and even after I wised up because I longed to belong—and around the holidays the clear cultural definition of “okay” has a lot to do with familial and romantic relationships.

Don’t mistake me—my parents and siblings (and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins) are the absolute best, and their love is the fire that warms me when I'm cold—but that isn’t the kind of family relationship portrayed (in media and story) as “acceptable” for a grown man, and since I don’t have a spouse and children, the holidays (for me) highlighted that “lack.” I felt like a failure because I wasn’t part of that kind of family. And the romantic element—the portrayal of the holiday season as a time for romance (mistletoe, anyone?)—coupled with my profound lifelong longing for romance, and during the holidays I felt like an absolute failure.

Eventually, my habit of reflection helped me look past what society was telling me, but I still longed for (and still long for) romance and spouse and children, and that longing (together with a lingering sense of my own inadequacies) bent my attention always toward what I lacked. As a result I neglected to appreciate all I had. Despite all I had (have!) in my life, I was melancholy whenever society celebrated those things I long for: romance, children, family.

Then, in July of 2012, I moved to Maui. This move has catalyzed big changes in me, changes that continue and multiply, good and positive changes, and among those changes is a change in how I experience the holidays. It didn’t happen overnight, but during this, my third Christmas since moving, I can clearly feel the difference.

I have not stopped longing for romance, children, and family. Those longings are innate, not conditioned by society—society twisted my reaction to those longings, but the longings themselves are neither “good” nor “bad.” I have stopped making those longings (and the lack they imply) the centerpiece of my holiday table. I have stopped judging myself by society’s standards. I have begun to embrace the incredible wealth I enjoy (in personal and spiritual and relational senses) and made that the centerpiece of my holiday table.

As I become more and more aware and appreciative of the abundance in my life, even those longings change character. No more do I feel like an empty vessel, needing to be filled with romance and companionship and children and family—instead I feel like an overflowing vessel and long for those with whom to share the goodness that flows through me. The very nature of my longing has changed, from a hunger to receive to a passion to give.

And that feels good. It feels good to face this season with perhaps a dash of melancholy, though different than what I have felt before, but also with a deep wellspring of gratitude and a powerful sense of fullness, rather than emptiness.

Happy Holidays!

Hope Abandoned, Hope Denied, Hope Dashed, Hope...Resurrected

Maybe it’s just me...

Maybe I’m the only one in whom hope wages a constant war with discouragement, disappointment, and despair, winning some battles and losing others but never ever decisively enough to end the war. Maybe I’m the only one...

But probably not. While the balance of power is likely different in every individual case, I imagine each of us deals with this war waged on the battlefield of our hearts. And sometimes each of us is tempted to just surrender hope and let the unholy trio triumph.

I know I’m sometimes tempted...

Hope depends on morale and morale depends (to some degree) on confidence, and confidence is not among my entrenched habits of mind. In some settings, I am quite confident, but in others—especially some where my desire is great—I lack confidence. It can make “going for” what I desire challenging, and while I wait for the outcome, I seesaw between hope and despair, sometimes rapidly.

Hope has a slight edge, simply because I’m unable any longer to sustain despair for too long, but it’s never something certain, never something I can take for granted. It wasn’t that long ago that despair owned me, and I cannot forget that, but somehow I’ve made hope the consolation prize (I just realized this!), and that’s not a great thing. Hope should be the default setting, and it really isn’t the default for me.

I most often feel the concussive reverberations of this battle in the context of theatrical auditions. I love “doing” theatre, but I am not so confident of my ability or suitability that I believe I will win a desired role. The best I can do is hope, and I sometimes do that badly. Since moving to Maui, I feel very much like the “new kid”—add to that the intimidating quality and depth of the Maui talent pool, and hope seems a frail reed indeed.

And yet, though it be frail indeed, I grasp at that reed. Although I treat hope as a consolation prize rather than a default setting, still I welcome hope. Despite its insufficiency, hope is my hero, because “hope springs eternal.” Hope is a perennial flower, the cat that “came back the very next day,” the “bad penny” that always turns up. I get frustrated, I feel defeated, I give up, I surrender...and a few hours or days or months later, hope resurrects itself and I rise with it.

And I strive to make hope my default instead of my consolation. Circumstances can be discouraging and outcomes are beyond my control—I do what I can and do my best to hope for the best without feeling entitled (in the interest of full disclosure, I am not always altogether successful at this).

We’ve all heard (and most of us have given) the advice, “Don’t get your hopes up,” but while I’m sometimes tempted—by doubt, discouragement, disappointment, and despair—I resist. I believe that while it absolutely makes me vulnerable and opens me up to hurt, hope is nevertheless worth all the risk, worth even the hurt.

It’s even worth the hurt...

Long Term

Another election has passed, and—as is generally the case—the balance of power has shifted. Some are gloating at their “triumph,” while others are licking their wounds, both of which indicate just how far astray our political process has wandered. Most, conditioned by media hype, let fear dominate their vote and their response to “opposing” viewpoints, and some on either side are and have been calling their “opponents” sometimes vile names.

Our current metaphor—elections as battles, with winners and losers—is fundamentally flawed. Our politics is not good vs. evil (with the roles of “good” and “evil” cast according to our individual political positions), but rather of competing visions of what constitutes “good.” Liberals/progressives as a class are not stupid (and the sobriquet “Libtard,” based as it is on the term “retard,” is offensive to those to whom it was once applied), and conservatives as a class are not lackeys of moneyed interests (and “Rethuglican” is every bit as inappropriate). The vast majority on either side sincerely want what’s best for Americans; they just differ on what that means.

We seem, however, to have lost sight of that simple fact—that rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans are not caricatures but human beings, complex and many-faceted, but essentially well-intentioned—and instead see the phantasms that pundits in the media paint in our imaginations. And the motives of the media are uncomplicated—“Whatever sells.”

If viewers can be made to fear something—anything, really—they won’t change the channel, and if they don’t change the channel, advertisers will pay. But advertisers aren’t the only ones to pay...we pay, too, although not with money.

Rather, we pay as a society...fear divides us.

In my Facebook stream this morning, someone posted that democracy tends to function better when there’s a common enemy—absent that, we turn on ourselves—and lately, that seems to be the case. It’s easy to cast extremists as the enemy, and extremists (on both sides) have the loudest voices—in many minds, they represent the side as a whole. Instead of uniting against a common external enemy, we manufacture enemies within—the Democrats, or the Republicans—and we attack them as vociferously as we ever did Communism or Fascism.

The thing is, we are not enemies. We may have different views, different ideas, different values, but we are fellow citizens and both as individuals and as a society we depend upon one another. It’s good that we have different ideas and different values, but our power is greatest when we combine them, not when we stand our (ideological) ground. When winning—an election or a debate or a majority or whatever—becomes more important than governing, we all lose.

So here’s my prayer:

May those elected honorably and faithfully serve the interests of all citizens (not just those who voted for them). May they abide by the principles that, when honored, lend honor and greatness to us all. May no one be considered expendable, may no one be counted an “acceptable loss,” above all may no one (liberal/progressive, conservative, or other) be counted an enemy. May they be willing to change their minds when evidence indicates that their views are mistaken. May they be humble servants of their constituents—all their constituents—and not rulers, even in their own minds. Insofar as they play favorites at all, may they favor the unfortunate rather than the fortune.

And may the rank and file on either side remember that we are all citizens together, and if we disagree, decide to disagree civilly (even if others do not—why would you let what others do determine what you do?). Let us all hold our representatives accountable for their actions, and if any mistreats, demeans, demonizes, or abuses others, deny them your continuing support.

With great power comes great responsibility...We the People have exercised our power in electing representatives, and we are responsible for what they do. Let us be vigilant and hold our representatives to a high standard. Let us not concede the high ground, let us not settle for the “least common denominator” without resistance, let us not forget politics and politicians until their actions affect us or until the next election. Let us rather expect much of our representatives, let us demand much of our representatives, let us get much of our representatives.

Why Teachers are Demoralized

I love my job. I love my job! I don’t love some of the things that others insist are part of the job, and I don’t love the climate under which I do my job, but (when I’m allowed to do my job) I love my job!

I don’t love grades and grading. I love giving students feedback—feedback fosters learning—but I actively hate setting a value on a given task and assessing a student’s performance on that task as a portion of that value. What about the rest of the story—the student’s growth, the student’s struggles, the student’s discoveries, the student’s development as a scholar and a human being—that grades on assignments never adequately capture?

And tests! I really hate tests. Left to my own devices, students in my classes would never take tests; I believe that other tasks—e.g. writing assignments, projects, and presentations—provide a much richer indication of a student’s learning than do tests.

Alas, I’m not left to my own devices.

Public school teachers everywhere are required to administer mandated tests which they did not write and which in fairness they should not include in their grade calculations. As a public school teacher, I, too, am required to administer certain tests. At my current school, where I see my students approximately 144 hours in a 180 day school year, mandated tests include:

• STAR Reading (twice/year at 2 hours per for 4 hours)
• Benchmark Assessments (BMAs: 8 times/year at 2 hours per for 16 hours)
• Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test (SBAC: once/year at 8 or more hours)
• EXPLORE Test (pre-ACT: once/year at 2 hours)

By these (conservative) estimates, students spend 30 hours of available instructional time on mandated tests. 30 hours testing divided by 144 hours of "contact" time equals just under 21%. I am not convinced that this is a good investment of students’ time.

There’s one reason teachers may be demoralized: being required to spend a significant fraction of precious instructional time administering tests of dubious merit when we know that our students learn little from taking them.

Believe it or not, the vast majority of teachers are passionately committed to their students’ learning. And while somewhere along the line most of us were indoctrinated with the idea that tests provided meaningful measures of student achievement (and if we write them to assess student mastery of the skills, concepts, and content we are teaching, they may), very few of us are anywhere near so committed to testing.

Testing is intimately connected to another factor that contributes to poor teacher morale: the deceptively named Educator Effectiveness System (or whatever it’s called outside of Hawai‘i—something like it exists in most states of the United States).

EES (or whatever) purports to measure the effectiveness of teachers, but both the presumptions that underlie it and the methodology itself institutionally demean teachers. The presumption is that teachers are terrible until they prove themselves otherwise, and the means by which teachers are required to prove themselves deserving of their (not exactly lucrative) salaries and (not exactly elevated) jobs are tedious, arbitrary, and insulting. Furthermore, those same high-stakes-for-schools, low-stakes-for-students tests (which only test how well students take them) are linked to educator effectiveness, meaning that teachers are held accountable not just for what they can control—e.g. classroom climate, delivery of concepts and content, quality of instruction—but also for what is beyond their control—e.g. home environment; extracurricular stresses; preexisting physiological, mental, and emotional factors.

The work itself—guiding student learning, fostering critical thinking and inquiry, igniting curiosity and a love of knowledge—is rewarding, but that considerable reward is significantly offset by the presumption that teachers are incompetent, the demand that we spend tens of hours of time performing and documenting work—work that does not necessarily or even usually contribute to our students’ growth as learners—in order to justify our existence, not to mention those not-so-lucrative salaries and the poor esteem in which we are generally held by the public whose children we serve...

I love teaching, and I know how fashion shifts in education as in anything else—if I don’t like the way things are done now, all I have to is wait a few years and I’ll have something different to dislike. I love teaching, but I tell any prospective teacher who will listen to do something else.

Teaching is both rewarding and heartbreaking, and the current educational climate, driven by a “reform” philosophy and the commercial interests of “Big Ed,” adds discouragement and tedium to the heartbreak. It’s hard, sometimes, to see the reward in light of what can feel like punishment.

And the coda is, morale is an important element of teacher effectiveness. Demoralized teachers have a harder time being effective than do teachers with high morale.

Passion vs. Reason

If you’re anything like me, you sometimes experience tension between who you are and what you want. Sometimes your highest nature—your passion—dares you to do something fraught with risk and potentially disastrous, while your reason cautions you that the path to a desired outcome is tried and true. And, again if you’re anything like me, reason often wins the debate.

I’m not suggesting that reason is the enemy. On the contrary, reason is a necessary part of our nature, and there are circumstances when reason should triumph—particularly when the stakes are truly high, reason’s perspective is vital—but I’ve discovered that in me, “reason” is often a disguise for fear or desire. Reason dresses up my fears and wants, giving them (seeming) legitimacy.

For example:

Although I love theatre and performance (in musicals and non-musicals), I find vocal auditions quite daunting under the best of circumstances. I lack confidence in my voice, even though it’s served me pretty well over the years, because (even though I know better) I tend to compare myself with other singers, many of whom have years more training and experience than I. Because when I audition I want a role, I typically play it safe vocally for the sake of my desire, even if my “higher self” wants to do something different that might open up new possibilities.

In the last month or so, I’ve begun to “discover” a part of my voice and vocal range I’ve longed for, because if I can grow in this direction it will open up more possibilities, and I decided that for my next audition, one of my songs would be in that range. It was a risky choice because that part of my voice isn’t quite ready for prime time, but I was determined, and vocally I was close to what I felt would show off this broader potential. I decided to risk it.

Yesterday was audition day. I woke up second guessing my determination. I had another song on deck that I knew I could do well and I wanted—oh, how I wanted!—to ditch the song I’d been preparing all month and go with one that was safe and might get me a role I wanted. It would have been so easy to go that route!

I didn’t. I stayed the course, although I sweated and fretted and, when it came time to sing that song, I tensed up and lost some of what I’d had all month. And the outcome was that I was called back for roles I’d probably have been called back for if I’d played it safe. I don’t think the risk gained me anything. It didn’t really expand my opportunities. I could have played it safe, avoided all that stress, and it wouldn’t have cost me a thing.

Only, that’s not the point.

I’m glad I did what I did—glad I took the chance even though it didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, even though it made no difference in the outcome, even though it could have reduced my opportunities—because in taking that chance I pushed back against both fear and petty want and reached for what I really wanted. I didn’t let fear and desire dress themselves up as “reason” and ground my lofty ambitions—I went for it, even if my voice trembled.

Too often, we adults lose what we all had as children: the unselfconscious ability to try anything just because we can. In learning to think things through and anticipate outcomes, we bury that spark of spontaneity and daring for fear of failure. We become perhaps too pragmatic and practical—we “play small” and stay within the bounds of what we know, rather than pushing into the frontiers of what might yet be.

For just a minute yesterday, even though I was terrified and my voice—my whole being—trembled, I dared…and I didn’t die.

I think I’ll dare again.

Liberty Call

When I was in the U.S. Navy, I loved “liberty.” Leave was awesome, but it was a fixed amount and when you used it up it was gone, but liberty was a renewable resource.

For those who don’t know, “liberty” was time off—duty free time—and was generally granted when:

1. Your unit was in a place that accommodated off-duty activities (whether in port or on base)
2. Your daily work was done
3. You were not assigned “watch” or other supervisory duties during the liberty period

Those who have never served in the military may not appreciate the significance of liberty (I think other branches may have called it “on a pass”)—you are accustomed to having a work schedule, and your employer has no claim on you outside that schedule, certainly no authority to control your movements when not working—but for service members, the military absolutely has the right to control your movements. Even when off duty, I had no inherent right to leave my ship unless I’d been granted liberty by Command.

Perhaps you can see, then, why I loved liberty call.

Liberty call meant that I had no duties whatsoever until liberty ended. I could go out and get drunk (I often did—this was before I got sober and long before I got happy), I could stay up all night, I could shop or gorge or do any legal thing (legal according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, admittedly a higher standard than civil law). It was freedom, for a night or a weekend, in San Diego or Singapore or Perth or Subic Bay, P.I.

You might be wondering why I’m dredging up all this admttedly-ancient history, and who would blame you? Five paragraphs and I still haven’t got to the point! Bear with me—it’s all relevant.

A couple of days ago, I read a post that made me think of…“elements”…I would like to be part of my life, but aren’t. Not so long ago, thinking about what I crave but lack would evoke feelings of bitterness and resentment and grief, but my practice has helped me grow beyond those reactions, and my reaction on this most recent occasion was very much like what I used to feel at liberty call. I realized that if those elements were part of my life, they would impose duties, as well, and while I would joyfully accept those duties (I would love to perform those duties in that service), I could also rejoice in not having them right now.

It was…“liberating”…to feel that way—to know that because those elements are not part of my life right now, I have greater “freedom” than I would if they were—even though I would trade that liberty for the sake of those elements without a qualm.

It’s another manifestation of “It’s all good,” and I’m happy to discover how far I’ve come in about a year.

I’m happy, full stop.

I’m happy!