briton, wombat, pumpkinator, sycamore
1. Brain is still on the blink from waking up (yes, it takes me this long most days).
2. They’re coming to fix my computer today. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
3. I acquired the new Green Day album yesterday, so “Are We the Waiting” has been going through my head all morning.
4. Here are some pronouns: I She We They Us Them He.
5. The idea of a tree is a magnificent thing. I want to climb one.
6. I find myself apprehensive about more things and situations in this life than I really care to admit. Part of that might be my utter social ineptitude, part of it might just be the nature of the beast (the beast being whatever particular situation I’m facing any given day).
A few months ago I was really apprehensive about teaching the auto fundamentals class to the kids, even though I was prepared and of course I knew what I was teaching through and through. But isn’t it interesting how rational explanations never seem to quell our emotions? Nothing I told myself made the knot in my stomach disappear. Driving there, I felt the nervousness mounting, and it reached the point where I just had to disengage my will from my emotional state, utterly and completely. In other words, I was just determined to move forward and to do what I set out to do without missing a step. And throughout the experience of teaching the class, it was almost as if I was outside myself, watching myself write on the white board, and answer questions, and pass parts around, and everything else the class comprised. Was I less nervous? Not really…but that emotion took a spectator’s view and watched the will carry me through. And the funny thing is that I really did my best–I could feel myself go for it, as it were, in certain situations, which seems a little counterintuitive knowing that my feelings were secondary, by and large. My preconceived notion of situations in which I would just do something regardless of how I felt about it was that it would end up a passionless ordeal, going through the motions by rote–but that experience opened my eyes that it didn’t have to be so.
I think there’s something to that. Last night I read more than a few Psalms that contained the phrase (or a variation thereof), “Praise the LORD, O my soul.” It’s almost as if the psalmist didn’t particularly feel like worshipping at that particular moment, but his will, his decision, was to do it anyway and to exhort his emotions to participate. And I can’t help feeling a sliver of recognition in that verse when I think about my experience teaching the class. It deepens the psalmist’s words immensely to be able to associate them with something I’ve been through.