That is not a description that I apply to myself.
It is one I am learning I have to apply on multiple levels.
It starts with the students at the school for emotionally disturbed teens where I teach, which for some may be the only place of safety they know. It may be the only place they can let out their pain, which makes it very difficult to teach them, hell, even very difficult at times to keep them under control for their own safety and that of other that are around.
Experiencing however little I do of their pain makes me more sensitive to the pain around me.
That is particularly true when I turn to events in the news.
Consider just yesterday.
The Secretary of State asks why American taxpayers should care about Ukraine? Ignoring the fact of how many Americans trace their heritage to that piece of geography, including those of Jewish background whose roots include those from “beyond the Pale,” most Americans react to atrocities and abuses around the world as human beings, not as taxpayers. It is only those who think only of profits or of geopolitics writ large that the human dimension is ignored. As the European Foreign Ministers who were most of the audience to which Tillerson made those remarks could tell him from hundreds of years of experience which includes two major world wars in the past 100 years and too many other conflicts, abuses such as that Russia has imposed upon Ukraine do not stay isolated within current borders. Remember, the Great War exploded because a disaffected Serbian nationalist assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne in a city in Bosnia.
And then there is the real passion of Europe. Football. Their football. Which once again became a target when the bus of Borussia Dortmund was hit with multiple explosions on its way to a UEFA Champions League quarterfinal against AS Monaco. Defender Marc Bartra suffered a wrist injury, but the trauma is not limited to visible and physical injuries. Bartra is a Spanish national team player. Also on that bus was the amazing young American national team player Christian Pulisic, and national team players from half a dozen other nations. Top world football clubs, with the passionate support they invoke, are among the most international of any kind of organization in the world. Yesterday’s attack brought back reminders of the international friendly between the national teams of France and Germany when Paris suffered multiple attacks, including a suicide bomber just outside the national stadium where the contest was being played.
But others may not care about football, or South Slavic nations which don’t offer oil executives the chance to make billions as does Russian Arctic oil (and why would we want to risk the possible serious contamination of that environment on top of the contributions it would make to global climate change is beyond me: there should be things far more important than the profit motive).
If I slow down and open my eyes, I can see pain all around me. It is tempting to want to ignore, perhaps to shut my eyes so that I can reserve my ability to feel for the pain only of those close to me, and.or to emphasize and demand recognition for my own pain, even if mine pales in comparison to that of many whose paths cross mine each day.
I get exhausted dealing with the pain of my students. I do far less content teaching than I have ever done. I could make sufficient money doing something far less exhausting than this. Too often I and the other fail to make the difference we — and our students — desperately seek.
But the alternative is to abandon them. Just like some in our government would easily abandon the Ukrainians (and to follow the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians) in order to gain more from the Russians.
I cannot do that.
I realize I may not last to the end of our school year in July although I will try. I may accept another challenging job for the next school year that would require me to begin that employment July 1. My own health might not stay up to the demands of what I am attempting to do.
It is like my attempts to step back from political involvement, which for me is also a moral obligation.
Yes, I know a few influential people who will listen to what I have to say, particularly on matters educational.
But I write on other topics as well, and it is also on those other topics that my words seem to have the most resonance.
That is not because of any moral superiority on my part. Far from it. Nor is it because my words are so skillfully presented.
It is rather than my words sometimes seem to empower others to speak up or to take action. When I write about my wife’s medical journey others begin to talk about their own experiences, and the sharing becomes something both healing and empowering.
Perhaps we may feel that we as individuals are of such insignificance that are words or actions will not change the big picture. In isolation that may be true.
Just as a single drop of water seems to have no impact upon a might landscape.
But many drops of waters over millenia and more carved the Grand Canyon.
We can be like the little boy walking along the beach throwing stranded starfish back into the sea, who when challenged that he cannot save them all, responds that he can save this one as he throws another back into the water.
We might not actually save the person whose pain we seek to assuage. But we model what should be the responsibility of all of us.
John Donne once told us not to send to learn for whom the bell tolls, because it tolled for us.
We are part of humanity even if we seek to shut ourselves off from much of it.
In teaching we cannot avoid the pain. When we learn to see with those eyes we find ways of helping those whose eyes are filled with pain experience other things.
The real reward in teaching is the doing of the teaching. And if we are lucky we also get glimpses of the joy at learning, of discovery.
The real reward in living is, at least for me, not so much my own joy but the joys and the discoveries I experience through the eyes — and ears and minds and voices and hands — of others.
I can lose myself in the Bach B Minor Mass. I can participate by singing or playing in the orchestra or I suppose even in conducting a performance. But I did not write it. My joy in it comes from beyond what I can do myself.
My joy in being human comes from my common humanity.
I will always encounter pain.
I will see it in faces, in eyes, in angry expressions.
I have to remember that pain means that person has not yet given up, for to feel pain is still to feel, and that gives the possibility to convert that negative feeling into something else.
If we do not shut our own eyes.
Today is our last full day before spring break. Tomorrow is a half day, and will not be academic.
Today I will start early, even if a bit too late.
On my way in I will stop at Dunkin Donuts. More than ¼ of my student will be on suspension today, and one may still be in the hospital because of an unfortunate incident. Before I go to school I have to prepare work packages for several students who will be out even when we come back.
But I want to bring some kindness where I can — to my students who are there, to my fellow staff members after a very rough day.
And I will have a pocket full of $1 bills and change, so when I stop for my coffee and I encounter some of those whose lives are so difficult that they beg for handouts I do not ignore them.
I cannot save all the starfish.
I cannot even save myself, but remain dependent upon the kindness of others.
But I can and must do what is within my limited powers.
Which starts with seeing the world through eyes of pain.
Peace.