On returning to the classroom
Photo by Polo Nimok on Unsplash
I’m emerging from MacLean Hall on Iowa’s Pentacrest and into the darkness of new identities. The heavy double-tiered double-doors from the 19th century make entering and exiting awkward. I’m prone to hold doors for those around me, but here I’m just trying to get through these with a backpack in a crowd.
As foreboding as the future is, today’s sun is ebullient. Its rays ricochet from sidewalk to sandstone building, making me search with slitted eyes for a patch of soft blue sky. A willow to my right offers shelter, and I accept until my eyes adjust.
Ambivalence is my emotional MO these days. It’s not the class or the students. It’s the experience, a soulful marooning. I am Odysseus, and teaching my Calypso. What am I still doing in the classroom? I feel stuck, rutter-less, alone. At the shore’s edge with the horizon stretching like an empty manuscript before me. I’m fearful to know what this role says of me.
I’ll present the predicament to a friend later, and she’ll jump in—unasked—to say she doesn’t feel cohesive either nor that all efforts are going toward the same identity. I was looking for hope. Her disruption is only helpful in that it nudges me toward what I coming to see: locating myself at the intersection of my floundering is failing.
You’d think that a man in his mid-forties would have some inkling of who he is. That he’d recognize the common thread amid his endeavors. I thought I did, but I now feel lost, searching for himself amid frayed ends of a former career, a former marriage, a new career, new responsibilities, new expectations.
But what is this place?
Odysseus and Calypso by Arnold Bocklin, 1883
I’m not the first to feel this way. I know. Odysseus felt lost on Ogygia in the safety of a beautiful woman, an island, and a promised immortality. I’ll share these feelings with another friend, and she’ll wait until I’m finished to say, “Your roots go deep. You’re not going anywhere.” Kind of like this willow I’m standing beneath. It’s roots transfix it to the Pentacrest. It does not move. It is not lost.
David Wagoner’s poem comes to mind. I’ve already obeyed his first command—stand still, that is. I stopped for vision’s sake, but I’m now realizing within arm’s reach of this “powerful stranger” a deeper vision was at stake. Leaning into the moment and against the trunk has a softening effect within me. Between us. The tree is not going anywhere; neither am I. We are one, embracing each other to allow the moment its purposeful end. As long as one traveling companion is not lost, no one is.
There’s a memory emerging from my childhood. I’m five or less because it takes place in Indiana, and we moved when I was five. The location is a hardware store, or some building supply with blue collars, high ceilings, and wooden pallets. I’ve fallen asleep on one and am now waking. My dad brought me here, but I don’t see him for a moment. The split second before I begin crying for him contains enough space for me to feel the loneliness of not knowing the space, not recognizing who is in this space, and forgetting what brought me here. The ceiling is withdrawn in shadows, Dad isn’t in sight, and there’s a forklift menacing but silent and nonoperational to my right. What is this place?
It’s pretty amazing to me that the me of forty years ago feels what I feel now. A split moment of panic before realizing that lostness has its own reward. I wouldn’t say that I’m found anymore than I the child when Dad came into sight. I just knew he wasn’t lost. Like my willow. I am vulnerable and felt it for that moment. Recognition defaulted to another’s awareness, another’s sense of self-confidence, and that has been good enough for me at least on two occasions. We contract with others to build our homes. Why can’t we with the identities we construct at different times of our lives?
A passerby smiles at me still in the shadow of the comforting willow. There’s a bud of gratitude for the memory that emerged from the time I left MacLean Hall. I experienced lostness, panic, and contracted recognition. I’m learning to find shelter in spite of the lostness and until lostness becomes its own type of shelter.
