Patience

It's 4:30AM, I can't sleep and I'm thinking about something one of my professors at that hippie granola grad school told me once about patience. At the time I'm sure I was displaying my impatience, as he was notorious for not returning emails and or any form of communication in a timely manner.I don't remember what I was harrassing him about, just that he was, as always, kind of laughing at me. He made this snide remark about my generation always wanting to rush. And in my head, I kept thinking duh! At that time I viewed my impatience as a virtue, something that served me far better than procratinating. It was constantly pushing me on to the next thing and moving felt better than standing still. Acting make me feel like I was getting somewhere.

But now that I am standing still, I think I finally got what he was trying to say to me. He wasn't trying to put down my ability to move, but rather trying to explain that systemic change takes a lot of time and that if you move at a pace like mine and try to pull everyone along in your momentum, you're going to break. It's like hitching a horse up to a skyscraper and saying "pull". There are iron roots in place, entire structures that would need to be dissolved before you could really move a building like that.

And such is the intricate web of how things happen at my school. Today was our first all staff meeting of the new school year and it was blessedly short, though followed by our administrative team meeting which for me was an exercise in frustration. The agenda is always deceptively simple, but as we know, even innocuous topics like recess can be a minefield of two hours of crying and screaming.So perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised when the topic of birthdays and food spiralled into a 45 minute discussion, after which we concluded that we would conduct the celebration of staff birthdays in the exact same way we have for the last year and that we won't have insane amounts of food at the staff meeting. You might think these things are unimportant, but I have come to realize that at my school issues like this are critical. It makes me wonder what it will be like to have my own business. What can I do to create a culture where the small stuff isn't such a big damn deal? Or is that even possible.

I think about the retreat I went on with the Black Girl Crew, where the issue of alcohol was raised. Is it okay to drink at our meetings? A simple question and yet, several meetings later this still hasn't been resolved. My instinct is to gloss over it and move on to more important stuff, but Dr. M (one of our advisors) encouraged us to step right into it and get to the meet of things. "You glide over too many things," she told us. And maybe we do, but how do you pick and choose what's worth it? Sometimes it seems insane, these long winding discussions about lice checks or who brings food for staff meetings. What are we gaining by dragging everything out? Yes, everyone gets to speak and everyone is heard, but then decisions are made and inevitably somebody is annoyed. I don't know if this is just some higher test of my ability to remain zen. Lord knows I've flunk that one several times. But maybe this year I'll try to have a little more patience for the process. Who knows, I might just learn something.