What aspects of my service brought me alive

Question: How did I serve in 2011? Whom did I serve? What aspects of my service brought me alive? What aspects drained me?

This past year was a homecoming for me of sorts. After a long and circuitous sidetrack, I feel blessed to have rejoined “my heart’s desire made visible” that I left behind 8 years ago. I feel doubly blessed to be where I am today, as it has taken me a long time to find the path. After serving many people and many things over the years, I am back to doing the thing that I was meant to do all along.

Whenever anyone asks me what I do for a living (teaching reading to at-risk youth), I inevitably get the kinds of responses Mother Theresa probably got when describing her work: “Good for you!” “That’s so wonderful!” “I’m so glad there’s people like you doing that…” Yes, ladies in gentlemen, part of being of service is realizing that what you do strictly because you enjoy it, is someone else’s idea of a tedious hell, a thankless road to a paycheck, and so on. Like other people who do socially valuable work, a lot of what I am doing is very rewarding to me on a personal level, but makes little sense to anyone outside of the situation.

Granted I am in the business of doing something to other people--for their own good (I’m a reading teacher, after all, and the kind of students could politely be called “reluctant”). At the end of the day though, I get to share what I love (reading) on a daily basis, in a way that is definitely for the greater good (society deems it important for people to learn how to read and write).

Or so people tell me. I don’t see it that way most of the time. I rarely think about teaching in those terms.

For me it’s something that simply makes sense, and it’s really impossible to imagine myself doing anything other than teaching.

The traditional definition of service is the giving of yourself to others, implying that the giving depletes your resources, and provides most of the benefits to the recipient. It’s almost a parasitic arrangement. Obviously that’s not sustainable, and explains why people who work in the “healing professions” get burned out. Teaching can be at its most draining when only one person (the teacher) is doing all the work. As a teacher, you have to constantly revisit what you are doing, and how you are doing it, and evaluate whether it’s working, whether it’s feasible, and whether it’s something you need to revise. Sometimes things need to be discarded when they are no longer useful. It can be draining when nobody wants to participate, when you get stuck in a rut, or when everyone needs some time away from each other. This is why you need holidays, surprises, and the occasional change of routine.

If you redefine service as “the act of sharing what you most care about for the greater good,” then you could say that in the end you are really sharing yourself—but in a way that sustains both parties. Teaching, when it is going well, is like this. Teaching, done well, is an act of intimacy. It goes beyond the crowd-control duties, the mandated learning objectives, and beyond all the imposed structures that get in the way of relationships and engagement. Teaching is an act of creativity. It’s an act of bringing the best of both parties out on the table and creating something far more satisfying and magnificent than either the teacher or the student can imagine. It really can be that grandiose at times…mundane lessons can yield some amazing things with the right ingredients of time, space, and participants.

Teaching is deeply creative, generative, and yes, risky, because it means you share your heart (and put yourself on the line). You can’t do it well if you are pretending. You can’t do it well if you don’t trust yourself or your students. It’s hard to be successful if either party is not being “real”. Teaching, when it’s going well, is almost as natural as breathing, and like breathing, involves giving and receiving. Both parties have to be willing to give and receive the best each has to offer for it to work. And miraculously it does, most of the time, and even the numerous variables presented by a room full of teenage boys!

a devil of a bargain

“When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle