28 January 2013: The Nature of my Knowledge

The other day, I was driving to campus for the beginning of the semester. My first days back are all faculty meetings and syllabus writing. These are not the days of exciting energy when students are refreshed and opened to learning new concepts and creating new ideas. These are the days when my colleagues and I secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) wish we could be home reading books that deepen our own knowledge. We wish we could slowly contemplate the perfect class, plucking ideas down as we were inspired by them. The first days back for faculty have often, in the past, given me the worst Monday blues of my life. I would even say they made me incredibly cranky.

However, as I was driving in for this semester’s beginning, I was listening to David Newman’s 2010 album ­Love, Peace, Chant. On it, he sings some of my favorite Kirtan tunes, and as the wheels were turning, I couldn’t help but chant along with him. I began to notice the sensation of joy rising in my chest, and instead of thinking about all of the enrollment statistics and new policy debates that might take place on this day, I thought instead about all of the wonderful people I work with.

I became in awe of all of the smart and generous people whom I get to call my colleagues. I was excited to hear their ideas and share my own even if we hadn’t had time to methodically sculpt those ideas into the perfect classes just yet. I felt so confident in that sensation of joy, that I began to feel trust in the process. As I sit at my desk, I can do little more than theorize. I can work through an idea and find its most perfect language, but that doesn’t mean I’ve found its most perfect expression, I need my colleagues and especially my students to verify the class is a good one.

My teacher Michelle Pietrzak-Wegner has been known to say, “If I waited to be a guru before I began to teach, I still would not be teaching.” I agree with her whole-heartedly, and I’ll add that if we waited, there may be something lacking in what we bring to our students. As we wade through the minutia of the ideas, we sometime miss the process that helps us arrive at our final understanding of a lesson.

Today, I am thankful that there is no such thing as absolute knowledge. We are in the inquiry of our thoughts. We can be confident and present enough to claim how exciting it is to be always on the precipice of finding, and we can take this journey with one another.