When I was teaching we used to take the kids out three times a year for trips into the outdoors. The shortest trip lasted five days and the longest lasted ten to fourteen days. The idea was to take the kids away from their learned definition of themselves and away from their distractions, take them away from their electronics and their comfortable beds so as to encounter something more elemental, more profound. I lived for those moments in the outdoors, for those moments when my own clarity and profundity had a clear, untrammeled stage.
In the middle of a three-day rainstorm once, I went from tent to tent adjusting rainflies, showing the kids how it was done in the process. I had good equipment for myself and knew how to take care of myself. I was dry and operated in a zone of joy that couldn’t be dampened by the deluge of rain. I knew my job was simply to pass on knowledge of how to live in these circumstances and there was completeness in the act. What to most would be a cause for discomfort and grand complaint was to me primal, elemental, and transfiguring. There is great power in this elemental state and much to learn from it.
We spend a great deal of money and energy to avoid our elemental state, find myriad ways to distract ourselves. One of the things we had to confront as teachers was the fact that many of our students came from very wealthy families where they could normally purchase any level of distraction they wanted. Why learn to properly pitch a tent in a storm when one can book an expensive room, even buy the hotel? Indeed, one of my students was an heir to the Hilton fortune.
Once my headmaster said to me, “John, I’ve come to the conclusion that money is a detriment in these kids' lives.” When Christ said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven, he wasn’t knocking money as much as he was talking about money’s ability to buy distraction from the elemental real nature of life. In our present age, though, we have suffered a democratization of distraction so that distraction from the elemental real is not just the province of the rich, but is something attainable by us all. It is our way of life and something we view as an inalienable right.
Article comments
1 - chantal
John...
Your writing has impacted my life in a way that I can't even begin to express with words. Never stop. You are making a difference.
As for the student you mentioned...it reminds me a lot of my father. He was very strict, hard, very stern, many times even cold and abusive to me and my siblings. He taught in a vocational high school, that in the area where we lived, was mostly attended by lower-income students, from families very often riddled with problems--drug/alcohol abuse, economic hardships, neglect, you get the idea.
Many of my fathers students lacked a positive male role-model in their lives, for some reason ,unknown to me at the time, they absolutely adored him. He became the father-figure they never had. And for many years, even after he retired, several students kept in touch with him, even sending him Father's Day cards.
A few years ago I ran into one of my father's students. This was a couple years after he had passed away, and the guy and I shared a few stories. I asked him why he liked my Dad so much. He answered "because he listened to us. He taught us everything we needed to learn for class, but he also taught us about life. He taught me how to be a man".
I was blown away by that. On the one hand, it was so strange for me to learn of this side of my father that was so distant from the man my siblings and I knew. But it also taught me that we can greatly impact peoples lives without even knowing it. By just doing what we do, by being who we are, and by being true to our gifts, we make a difference.
2 - gonzo marx
John...
your Writing always strikes me liek a haiku, wordier cuz we Americans like to "talk" a lot...the the same Feel always touches me after the Read...
if only one person ever reads your Thoughts displayed...and takes a moment to stand in the Storm, and Accepts it...lives It
then you are Wealthy beyond measure, because you will have helped that Individual to rouse from Sleep and shed the constraints of the Logos for a while...and been Awake
what greater Worth can be Asked for?
/bows, hand over fist
Excelsior?
3 - diana hartman
I am pleased to tell you this article is being featured in the Culture Focus today, July 11.
Diana Hartman
Culture Editor
4 - John Spivey
Thank you. I do appreciate your support. It's good to hear from all of you again.