Some nights are not for speaking of…
Some nights are beyond speech.
And yet I am motivated to put some words around them– not as a faithful rendering of the actual events, but to conjure up the evanescence of memory later on… memory made more clear by the recording of words.
My to-do list is screaming at me, but I am learning… or rather, trying to learn that I must tune it out to do what really matters. Sometimes. Other times, I really ought to tend to it more.
Lately I have been subconsciously dealing with a lot of “sufficiency” issues. I say subconsciously, not because I haven’t had these issues smack me in the batooky before, but because I didn’t recognize them in their insidious form this time. I merely recognized their manifestation as a deep, pervasive dread and fear of going to work.
I’m not afraid of hard work. I actually tend to enjoy it, once the initial hump of torpor is passed over. But the stresses, challenges, and sheer enormity of what awaited me at work after fall break made me tremble. I was so terrified that I couldn’t look through my fear to actually analyze what was making me so afraid.
So professional, right?
I managed to muscle my way through my first day back, thinking a mixture of “this isn’t so bad” and “this is so bad!” and, more prominently, “what am I missing and doing wrong?”
Thank(God)fully, I decided to stop by and talk with a much older (and wiser, and more experienced) teacher. I shared the more professional version of what I had been experiencing, and she told me something that I had apparently forgotten:
It’s okay to say no.
It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to not be superwoman. And please, stop being so hard on yourself.
The only person being that hard on you is yourself.
It was a wet slap to a numb face.
I had unknowingly, almost arrogantly, allowed my perfectionism to creep up, and had placed before myself ever-mounting goals and ideals that I, in my wilted, rookie, imperfect state have no chance of attaining. And so, naturally, I despaired. And so, naturally, I grew afraid of facing the fierce giant armed with a nuclear missile and a cute puppy (both of which are disarming, but in completely different ways).
Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I forget that perfectionism is not a good thing. It is the stubborn malfeasance that gives you the audacity to think that you, of all people, know exactly what’s best— in every circumstance, and even more than God.
Yeeah.
Oops.
After work today, I decided to take a walk around my neighborhood. (My sedentary life lately has been, well, too sedentary.)
There’s a dirt road I walk down that has several families that own horses. At the end of the road is a small ranch with stables, and along the road there is a large corral which is usually empty. But tonight it wasn’t.
My heartbeat quickened when I felt the staccato thump-thump-thumpthump of hooves before I could see into the pen– I knew that a horse was cantering around the corral. I walked down the road, to where there were no bushes obscuring my view, and sure enough– a beautiful thoroughbred-quarter-horse mix was gamboling up and down the corral, having a wonderful time. A woman in a pink shirt walked towards the horse, and I thought she was trying to get close enough to the horse to bring her in. Then she started backing away while whistling, clapping, and talking to the horse– and the horse listened.
I watched in awe as the mare started galloping (okay, somewhere between a gallop and a canter) along the edge of the fence– dangerously close, especially when rounding the corners and turning around. It was amazing to see how the horse responded to her master’s cues– claps, “good, good!” and “easy on the turns.” Then there was the horse itself– pounding the dust into the air, breathing in quick snorts (longer ones as the exercise continued), gleaming in the fading light, proud of her strength and glorying in the activity and her prowess.
I was amazed at all the horse was able to do under the tutelage of her owner– and yet, as I watched, I realized that what she did was not too much of a stretch from her natural proclivities and propensities. Yes, the mare was diving and turning with far more finesse than she would in the wild; there were just inches between her and the fence. But she was still diving and turning like a horse ought, not growing hands and changing the tire on a car.
The thought rushed on me as she rounded the pen once more, thundering towards me: I am quite a bit like this horse.
God gave us natural proclivities and propensities, and natural aversions to other things, and while he may very well stretch us and grow us– tell us to gallop very close to the fence– he is not going to tell us to jump the fence and start a mariachi band. I think I have very much been trying to be something I am not– I have been leaping over fences, and expecting myself to suddenly possess the knowledge and know-how to take an engine apart and re-build it for street racing. Which doesn’t seem that realistic to me (even if I wasn’t a proverbial horse in this scenario).
And back to my original dilemma– Work. Teaching. Learning how to teach.
I can’t expect myself to become a world-famous mariachi musician when I’m barely learning how to round the corners. So instead of feeling like a failure because I can’t jump the fence and join a band with really swirly dresses, I’m going to listen better to the One who is telling me to take the corners a little easier, and to make those turns a little sharper. And who knows– He may eventually teach me how to stomp in time with mariachi music.
Six Months Later 