"We have only this chance to love – now, today..."

This weekend, I was continuing to read Mark Nepo’s Book Finding Inner Courage. He says, “We have only this chance to love – now, today, to love whoever or whatever is before us. For the mountains will outlast us. The love will outlast us…put down whatever you have carved that is sharp – your mind, your edge, all your prepared responses.”

Later, he talks about a teacher who continued to work with her students even despite the violence and gunshots outside her inner-city classroom doors. The teacher comforted her students, and walked them home after school one day. She says that it is her “job to find something to love in every child.” As a teacher, I find that to be so true. There are 2 kids in my homeroom class that definitely have a learning disability – unfortunately there is not a good system for catering to special-needs students here in Namibia. So I do the best that I can, and I appreciate actually how compassionate the other students are towards these two as well.

It reminds me of some of the inspirational teacher movies that are out there…Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, the one with Mr. Vincente in which his AP class in an inner-city school beats all of the odds to get a top score. And I want to be that teacher. Teaching demands that you look beyond the surface and the everyday. It isn’t easy when you are faced with disrespect, classroom management issues, etc. But it is our job to look beyond this. It is kind of like Howard Zinn who says that you have to study history to APPLY it to today’s world, seeking and applying its relevance to today, not merely working within history, observing it as a relic, but actively engaging it. It is the same with teaching, or really with anything – there is the theory and the praxis and the trick is melding and merging the two.

Finally, a love theme surfaced in what I have been reading and listening to. There is, again, Alice Walker’s quote, “Anything we love can be saved.” And in Nepo’s book he says that “God was not interested in my theology, but my capacity to love.” India Arie sings about “the greatest disease in the world is hate…the cure for hate is love.” Love is certainly the most Godly and powerful of forces in the world.

A real test of these reveries will be how and if they apply to the frenetic pace of life in the U.S. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, you think ahead to re-entry and re-integration. Of course it will happen – we as humans are infinitely adaptable. But I don’t think it will be easy, and I certainly want to integrate many of the new lessons and philosophies that I have learned here back into my life in the U.S. I don’t think it is healthy to run so fast and so hard that you have no time to think about where you are going or why. I don’t think anyone benefits when most people in society are over-stressed and over-worked. The key is the elusive middle ground, and seeking balance is truly a lifelong journey.