It’s difficult right now to admit to the feeling of what I can only describe as sanguine contentment, if not, dare I say it, happiness. The audacity to feel positive about anything these days is almost a revolutionary act – one runs the risk of provoking the ire of those who aren’t, and to be fair, there is no shortage of reasons to rightly feel apocalyptic. I leave it to the reader to supply their own list, which I’m sure has plenty of overlap with my own.
I run an especially high risk, as my lifestyle is atypical, sheltered even by covid standards, and comfortable. By and large, both my needs and wants are more than adequately provided for, a position I am keenly aware of and do my best to deserve, no matter that I will always fall short. One of the ways I do this is by attempting to stay well informed of how everyone else experiences their lives and never forgetting the circumstances of my own life when I was not nearly as fortunate.
Because I come to my privileged life by way of marriage, I have received the side eye by relatives both near and distant; it’s a good thing I learned a very long time ago to ignore the opinions of most people, perhaps relatives most of all. I am, however, human – there are people whose opinion I very much value. I’ve learned to choose these people with care and then cultivate those relationships with even more care.
Not all of the people whose opinion I value are aware of how highly I hold them in esteem. These people I am especially careful about, which generally translates into an aloof distance on my part. Fortunately, the list of people who fall into this category is not large, a handful at best. About the same number as the people who do know how I feel about them.
Sometimes, I regret my truncated career in education – I think I would have formed some long lasting relationships, or at least made an indelible impression, on more than a few students. As much as I enjoy time alone, need it really, I also enjoyed the performative aspect of teaching, the dialectic between student and teacher. The classroom is one of the few places outside of my home where I feel comfortable, most of all as the student.
Because fate dictated otherwise, I was spared the frustrations of the modern educational system: the ever shifting state mandated pedagogy revolving around content that rarely changes, the lack of adequate supplies, the overloaded class sizes, to name only a few. I often wonder if I would have turned cynical and weary, or risen everyday to tilt at those windmills no matter how ostensibly futile the attempt. I like to think I would have found a way to drag the content I wanted into the classroom, no matter what the powers that be said.
What does all this have to do with feelings of sanguine contentment? Well, I bring all this up to point out first principles, that is to say, as much as life is planned even more of it is less so, or at least, not planned by you. Retracing past steps is a privilege afforded to those who live long enough to profit by it. For some people this results in despair. The only respite I have found when I felt this way is a stubborn trust in the river of time.
Things change. They must. They always do.
As they said so often in basic training – you never quit. You don’t get to stop. To surrender is the worst thing you can do. I am quite aware of the monstrous nature of those sentences. I do my best to avoid absolutes and I believe there is a time for surrendering, when the struggle makes things worse, not better. Yet, as a general principle, it is a good one to follow. I say this having failed at it many, many times, in multiple aspects of my life. To be able to see that in yourself is part of following the creed – one cannot learn from a mistake unexamined, which means being able to know you’ve made a mistake in the first place.
The knack of changing your mind, in unlearning a thing in order to relearn what is necessary, is priceless. I’ve tried and failed at this as often as I’ve succeeded, and miserably at times when it comes to other people, but learned much, if not slowly, in the process. The important thing to remember is that you can change your mind, followed immediately by you probably should more than you’re comfortable admitting. I like to think I prompted the practice in a few students I’ve had the privilege to teach but that may simply be hubris on my part. The compulsory nature of modern primary education has the mixed blessing of a guaranteed captive audience – preloaded with the expectation that learning will take place, even though evidence provides results as mixed as the blessing. I think we lose a vital something by making education compulsory past a certain age and not making education understood as something that never ends. The question becomes, are you the one choosing that education, or is it being chosen for you?
The best way, of course, is to make school a place people want to go, no matter what age you are. Instead of constructing large warehouses for the young and deeming that school, we ought to be instilling the notion that there is no place that is not school. The games we play, the movies we watch, the music we listen to, the relationships we cultivate and have forced upon us, are all classrooms, but nowhere is this more true than in the minds and characters we are all tasked with improving.
Sanguine contentment is a state of mind one can teach themselves into attaining. It is not a state of mind everyone is predisposed towards – it takes, well, I can only speak for me; I think there are more ways to achieve this than the one I found works for me. Some people seek it not at all. I’ve heard more than one professional comic say they dread contentment, they believe their pain is the wellspring of their humor and without it, the laughter dries up. Sanguine contentment cannot exist in a mind like that, it’s an act of self negation to seek it.
I know there are people who claim to be able to point the way to happiness. I am not here to join them or to point to one or more who I say got it right. That’s not the job of a teacher. The job of a teacher is to teach. Ah, that’s a nice tautology you have there, I hear you say, but what is it that YOU teach?
Whatever the student most needs to learn.
I am both student and teacher. (And so are you.)
Education is knowing when to teach and when to learn.
Sanguine contentment is to achieve both simultaneously.