Slow down, you move too fast...

So, this morning I was rushing- rushing through my oatmeal, trying to put away the dishes at the same time that I was boiling the water, at the same time that I was figuring out what to wear… Then when I sat down to eat my oatmeal I reminded myself to slow down, to be present for my oatmeal. I had tried this last week too. When I tried it last week I thought to myself, “Yeah right! Be present for my oatmeal and be late for work! How is that helping? This being present doesn’t work in a world that keeps moving!”

But this morning I thought, “Oh wait, I don’t have to buy in to that ‘world that keeps moving’ thing. The only reason that I think the world keeps moving is that I think that I can keep up with it or control it. It’s true, it is moving, time is passing every second but me being late? That’s just me thinking I’m being late for some thing that I’ve decided I can control or do something about.” Now, I’m not saying that I don’t need to get to school on time or that if I show up five minutes later it’s not going to affect the amount of time I have to prepare my lessons. But the thing is, there isn’t really a fixed thing that, if I get there on time, will make my day perfect, or even better. This thing is just me believing that I can control what’s going to happen today at school. I can prepare for it, but I can’t know what’s going to happen or make it happen one way or another. It’s going to happen to me, not me to it.

And that’s exactly what happened. I got to school and found out that I had breakfast duty which meant that I only had until 7:30 to get ready instead of 7:50. I was annoyed but I tried to do what I did on my first day of school when I was late: focus on what would make the kids happy. I did, and ended up having time to get their clocks ready for our math lesson. I wasn’t totally prepared for their math lesson but it turned out that they really don’t know time so I changed the lesson from duration of time to just reading the clocks. I wasn’t prepared for their dictionary lesson but we ended up getting way more involved in the reading lesson than I expected anyway.

It’s like things just kept popping up today but instead of them rocking me off course, they just popped up. I didn’t breathe or slow down or even be present for them but I also didn’t freak out or try to change them. They just were, and I responded by kind of going with them instead of fighting them or getting upset by them. I do wish I had taught more today and had been more prepared for the lessons that I taught. I know the lessons are better when I think them through from the point of view of my kids and make them really interesting and cool. But this afternoon, I actually responded instead of reacted to the kids. They were annoyed because I wanted them to wait until they knew all of the directions before packing up. I asked them to raise their hands if they knew what to do and most of them raised their hands so I just let them go. And they totally did it, they didn’t need me to control them. They weren’t perfect, they talked and teased and lost their homework on the floor but I let them be instead of holding on to what I wanted them to be. It wasn’t like some big epiphany today but it feels like a loosening, a confidence in letting things go.