I know that I’ve discussed with you my concerns about the scattered mind, particularly my own. When I used to teach, my students would call me “conflicted.” I like the word ambivalent better, or any word that signifies the discombobulated, random, cattywampus corners of my brain-spaces.
I worry about it, a little. I worry about my inability to maintain a valid daily plan. You’ve never seen someone so eager to throw out the day’s plans. I think I know what I’m going to do, but I always find myself amazed that this is how the day turned out. Meal plans are lost on me. I’ve stood in front of my refrigerator staring at some exotic vegetable or hopeful block of tofu, wondering what my original intention for it was. I guess we’ll never know.
Lately my concerns with my straightforward planning/thinking arise because I’ve gone back to teaching a couple of English classes at a local high school. For this, planning is key.
In one sense, I over plan, in fear that the first option will fail. When this happens, it is important to do a smooth, Friends-like PIVOT!! and find another way to get through. However, sometimes I’ve been worrying, that I’m not really giving my first idea a chance.
I almost NEVER do the thing I planned the day before, constantly switching it up in some way. Either the kids bring up something that makes me begin the lesson from a point unknown or I just forget where I was going to start, once I’m met with the blank faces of those who are counting on but don’t actually want me to start teaching.
In order to make sense of my nonsense, I went for a walk and found myself a metaphor.
I was walking across a patch of sidewalk that was lined with piles of perfect acorns. A few crunched beneath my feet before I decided I should pick one up and rescue it from my own giant-footed indifference. I started walking again, just holding the acorn in my hand, my hand in my pocket, feeling the smoothness and the sharpness in turn.
When I got to the end of the street, I started to feel bad that I’d taken this nut so far from where it had fallen, as if I had interrupted its destiny. And despite this thought, I began to justify my theft, starting with, “it’s an acorn, not alive.”
(I think the Toy Story movies have just ruined inanimate objects for all of us. But also there’s the hikers adage about leaving nature as you found it.)
Coincidentally, I was listening to a podcast that turned out to be about lost objects and how a scattering of random photos from the post office turned up in someone else’s package and then made their way to one person who very much needed to be found.
All this made me feel as if I were responsible for this stupid acorn - I felt I had to put it somewhere, or bury it or do something to make its journey worthwhile.
I have become a squirrel. Let the one-woman performance art piece commence.
A woman enters SR, she’s wearing black and a long, high pony tail. She sniffs, and then begins to move her head around, looking... She spots an acorn and begins to cross, hopping SL in sporadic movement. Maybe we hear the sound of traffic, and near misses as she weaves her way. Finally, she picks up an acorn and nibbles at it before stacking it with another pile already DSC. She scoops up as many as she can and then looks for a place to hide it. She spots the audience. Woman walks into the audience, handing out acorns, putting them in people’s purses and pockets, showing them how to hold their hand out like it’s communion, wrapping it in their scarves. When she is finished sorting all of the acorns, she goes back to Center, remembers, and returns to pick up one more nut for herself, then wraps herself in the fetal position, carefully holding her acorn as she falls asleep.
So if each of those audience members takes home those acorns, they might find them randomly, later that day or month or the next year, tucked in a coat pocket, and then.. what? They remember or they drop it, and they smile or they sit on it. The acorn lives on. And if the acorn were an idea?
I made this analogy to my classroom: Those passing ideas, lost thoughts and lessons that I thought I was teaching very often turn up in different places. Old students have told me what I said and sometimes it’s what I wanted, (they find the acorn, they smile and accept it) but often it has very little to do with the great theses of my life (they sit on it, or miss it completely).
Fun squirrel fact #1: We’ve all heard by now the likely incorrect though beautiful idea that squirrels leave behind more than 75% of the nuts they bury, and because of this, they are responsible for repopulating whole forests of oak trees. It’s possible then, that my random points, my lost daily plans, all have a purpose whether they end up when and where I originally intended them to be.
The thing about squirrels is that it’s their job to move these nuts around.
My impromptu lessons or even my off-hand remarks may come to nothing - like so many acorns just brushed into the leaf pile. But there is that possibility that they could sprout a little later on - memory is long after all. And the big thing is, who knows what ideas actually get buried in those psyches?
I also take heart that one seed, one tree even, doesn’t make a forest. My idea might plant in there next to another and maybe those ideas will grow together. So randomly deciding that they have to know who George Gershwin is, for example, is not altogether not part of the plan. Or having an impromptu conversation about what it means to be an adult… who knows where it will end up.
It’s possible that squirrels can find 95% of their stash, but they might abandon them for easier-to find food. Like my lesson plans - I plan and plan but then the idea that appears to me in the moment, always seems to be the right one.
Fun squirrel Fact #2: Squirrels very often store their nuts in categories. So, a student comes to an English class each day, storing information in categories of: interactions with their class, the teacher, themselves (introspection) and the story. The hope is that though they forget the details of the day, their long term memory works to get them back to the basic stores that will feed them for life. Grandiose analogy? You betcha.
Fun (and final) squirrel Fact #3: Squirrels, like kids, are smarter than we think. They may pretend to hide nuts in one place and then wait until they know they’re alone to stash them for real. Maybe this is like the kids who pretend not to listen, who are too cool to do the work in earnest. Can I tell myself that they’re just waiting to use it later? If it makes me feel better, again, you betcha.
“Art is long and Time is fleeting!” said the great Longfellow. The Art is timeless, but it does take time to store it up.
I love what I’ve squirreled away in this life. It’s mine, no matter what - what acorns of wisdom hover always in my consciousness, what conversations remain, what lectures held.
Moments of failure and success are buried all in neat little piles, waiting through a winter of waylaid ideas for their moment in the sun.
Until then there is only hope, gratitude, and the quick/slow passage of time. In other words, Take heart. Take Time. I’m talking to you, Jodie.
Happy Thanksgiving my little acorn hoarders. Rest assured I am digesting all of your little nuggets of wisdom as well.
Loved this, Jodie. Spreading our little acorns as we also gather from others. An idea to be cherished, for certain.
perhaps all of that planning that you do isn't quite finished until you waltz into the classroom and only THEN do you finish? right on the spot. i dunno - winging it often brings the magic! xo