You have everything you need. Promise.

Life isn’t about having everything you want in your life.
It’s about making the life with what you have in you.
-Bharjina Ahmed

This is not an email about resolutions or goal setting.  

There’s a place for that, yes.  Believe me, I spent time planning out the next year with all my good intentions.

But many of the things that appear each year on my lists are the same things.  They are what I want to keep doing, what I want to find more of.  Not what I want to take away.

Thinking in terms of deficiency doesn’t get us real far.

Believing that we have to always add or subtract  from our lives to be enough is not always helpful.

You may feel broken, but you’re not.  

This is a tough school year.  No matter if you’re doing “well” or feeling completely unmoored, it’s been a roller coaster to say the least.  This is not unhopeful or negative. It just feels like the truth.

Despite our longing for a fresh start in 2021, there is even more national unrest that we have to grapple with how to best address these events in our classrooms.

But as we are at a technical “new beginning” and fresh start to our calendar, we still have the opportunity for a reset if you will. 

In the advent of our new reality of masking and distancing, the truth is that the content we spent years in college learning is proving to be secondary.  

Because we all know that what Maya Angelou said rings true most of the time…

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
 And I would say without question that this holds true for most students.

Sure we need to know some tech tools, but simplicity is key right now.  You don’t need to learn more things, you just need to re-discover, support, dust off what is already there inside of you.  

And be there for students.  And you can be your best for your students by doing the best for yourself. 

Find the natural state of who you are.  And know that you are enough.  You are enough for this moment.
 

It may take some uncovering, but you have all you need inside of you to meet this moment.

So for the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing those qualities that you already have inside of you that will support your wellbeing whether you’re going into the classroom, have a virtual Zoom meeting, or do something in between.

They will support you if you see students in the office or talk to them over the phone.  These are skills that may need dusting off but they are there.

Then we can take these qualities and refine them, but first we need to wake up those things inside ourselves that we may have forgotten about, put on the back burner, or never really acknowledged as important.

Sure our content matters.  What we teach our students is particularly important to us, otherwise we never would have done this job.  But our content knowledge is not going to be the thing that saves us right now.

We have spent years refining our content and crafting our lessons, for the rug to be pulled out from under us.  So because of that, we are called to rely first on some other qualities that will allow us to get back to our content in a way that is sustainable, if not regenerative.
 

So I look forward to moving through these next weeks with you reminding you that you already have everything you need.