Well-Resourced: Coming Back
after you're down for a count.
In this note:
I missed arriving in your inbox last week
How do you return to something? Or someone?
If anyone can make a teachable moment out of something, it’s educators and caregivers! And even more so if you are also a self-reflective human.
Given that I’m both (and since you’re here in this newsletter habitat you very likely are both too), I’ve been in my process of reflecting on this past month.
I was down for a count due to family with COVID (grateful that everyone is healthy now). I moved around a lot of commitments and missed writing to you last week.
I’ve been alternating between feeling:
completely scattered
immense gratitude
overwhelmed and depleted
doubt
a rush of enthusiasm every now and then
What all these feelings have been telling me is that it feels really strange to return and re-enter!
I’m completely enamored with transitions and change and how us humans move through them.
This is yet another transition to add to the long list of transitions humans make their way through: returning to daily routines after a personal/familial crisis (for lack of a better word here, though ‘crisis’ does seem apt). And doing this within multiple other crises simultaneously taking place.
The crisis itself is a transition, and most likely an incredibly abrupt transition. The return to daily life feels abrupt too, though can be quite slow and bumpy, at least for me.
The return-to-daily-life transition happens when we re-enter after great experiences too—vacations, field trips, sabbaticals—though likely all of these have been affected by the pandemic in one way or another. The return-to-daily-life transition can be challenging whether the experience away was grand or scary.
This has me thinking of the many times I’d chat with a co-teacher about how a child had recently returned from vacation and that likely played a part in the child’s shift in behavior. Well, of course it would!
How can we shed more light on this particular transition of returning to something or someone?
Whatever or wherever the ‘away’ was, the person who was away has certainly learned new things and moved through new experiences. The person who was away may also feel and be a really different person now.
How can we make intentional space for more of the ‘away’ stuff to be integrated into the ‘here and now’ place—whether that ‘here and now’ place is the learning environment, the home, or the (maybe remote) work environment?
A simple example is when an educator invites a child to bring in and show their classmates some pictures from their trip, right?
There’s value in that! And how can we give more space?
In giving more space for the person who was away to re-enter and return, I believe, we are also giving more space for ourselves to re-enter and return when we’re the person who was away.
We really can give ourselves—and one another—more of a runway to re-enter and return, as well as integrate all that’s been experienced while away.
If you have ideas to share, please do. I’d love to hear. I’m in the process of returning to reading comments and email replies.
Is there a person in your daily life—and in your time away—who you think would enjoy pondering this, too? You can share this post with them by clicking the link below. They aren’t subscribed to anything, you just get to share this post with them.
Til next week,
Cassandra