Is it not enough to be better than I, myself, thought I could be? Is is not enough to be better in order to be who I thought I could be.
Want to be.
To be the better person means to look at the other and think,” There is a reason you are doing this. You are insecure, inadequate, selfish, self-righteous, lost, hurt, afraid.”
To be better means to grow internally, to choose me over you. To be better means to do what is right because it is right and not because you have put me there.
To be better is to act; to be better than is to react.
This year, I had the greatest honour I have ever had.
Our class of 2021 voted for me as their graduation speaker which, as one of my colleagues put it, is about as good as it gets for a teacher. Students were on campus for graduation and families attended from home via livestream.
These were my words to our students, and to students everywhere:
It is a true honour to speak to you today, and I thank you from all of my heart. The best way to describe my feelings upon hearing about this is the Yiddish word verklempt, which roughly means full of emotion and speechless. I felt this way because I was deeply touched and I had no idea what to say. Just because I think a lot of things doesn’t mean I know a lot things. But I have lived a lot and this has led me to some understandings. In the next few minutes, I will do my best to share them with you.
Over the past two years, I have watched this class grow in many ways, the most significant of which, the one that I think best defines this class, is how you have grown in your resilience. To be resilient means to bounce back, to respond to adversity, to rise up stronger and wiser than you were before. You did this, and continue to do this, in rather complicated circumstances while managing your studies, maintaining hobbies and activities, and making plans for the future. You rose to this challenge. And now, you are here. This is resilience.
The ability to be resilient, to see challenges as opportunities to grow, is something to carry with you always, regardless of what happens next week, next month, or five years from now. And as we all continue to learn, we cannot rely on well-laid plans, but plans are required if we hope to move forward. Resilience is the story of the class of 2021; what will be the story of your individual life?
A few years ago I discovered rock climbing, and it has become a significant part of my world. My favourite of the climbing gym’s motivational posters says: Ask yourself if what you are doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow. Only you have the power to live your life. All actions have consequences, and your decisions will set you on different roads that allow for different possibilities. I have learned that these decisions affirm who we are, and also lay the foundation for who we will become. And even though you might wish otherwise, you will never know where the other road might have taken you, and you will never know who you might have been had you taken it.
So this is a critical question: What kind of person do you want to be as you begin your next chapter? Educator John Holt wrote, “The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.” Your character guides how you respond to your environment and those around you, and it is your character that exemplifies the values that are central to how you understand yourself and others. When we are confident and comfortable, surrounded by family and friends, we know who we are. Here, at Southeast Asian International School*, you know who you are. You know who is there for you, what is expected of you, and how to behave.
But things are about to change. Graduation marks the end of this chapter and the beginning of a new journey. You will have beautiful, remarkable, memorable moments. But there will also be times when you stumble. When you fail. When you are caught unawares, uncertain, or having made a terrible mistake. But you have proven yourself to be resilient, and this means that you will stand up and you will begin again. And if you are courageous enough, you will find yourself with choices.
Ask yourself if what you are doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow. Sometimes, the way forward is obvious and you clearly know what is the right thing to do. But sometimes, actually doing the right thing is very hard. This is when you need to ask yourself about the person you are becoming and what matters to you. You can decide how to act, who to be around, and how to build the community you want to live in. And you can change your mind when the road you are on is not right.
To send you on your journey, I would like to offer my deepest hope for you: That you find a path with a heart. This idea comes from The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda, which is somewhere between anthropology and memoir. Don Juan explains that a path with a heart can go anywhere or nowhere – how it goes is what matters. As I understand it, when a path has a heart, it is right. It is the deep conviction that we experience without the need for words. This is the path that gives us joy, strength, and a sense of peace.
And finding this path takes work, perhaps trying multiple paths before reaching the right one. You will know that you are on your path when it speaks to who you are, how you understand the world and your place in it. Sometimes, you can keep going with what you have already begun. But sometimes, the scariest and most important thing to do is stop and start again. The choices that we make, and the character that reflects our values and guides our behaviour, allow us to walk a path with a heart. Doing this takes resilience, it takes courage, and it can take us to places we’ve never dared to imagine.
As poet Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot, wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
Travel the path with a heart. The path is a journey. The journey is life.
Congratulations, Class of 2021. I can’t wait to see who you become.
The road to Devín Castle – Bratislava, Slovakia – January 2019
*Name changed to protect the innocent, as a friend and former colleague would say
I started practicing yoga about 11 years ago. My roommate was on a quest to lose wait in a natural and healthy way – by monitoring what she ate and making a habit of exercise. She asked if I’d be willing to get up early and do yoga with her. Of course I was! All I knew of yoga at that time was what I had learned through years of dance classes – knew child’s pose, plank pose, tree pose, and perhaps down dog had slipped into popular culture by then. At the time, my own exercise aside from dance was running, largely because my then-boyfriend was a runner and according to him, running was the only type of exercise worth doing.
But yoga was different. It was mine, first of all, something I started to help a friend and something that helped me far more than I helped her. Yoga was a way to stretch that helped me in dance, but also helped with the meditation that I’d been dabbling in for many years. I was in middle school the first time I read about what I now understand to be a body scan meditation, and I was in high school the first time someone led me through one. Yoga pulled all of this together, but like with many things, I didn’t realize it at the time.
The beginning was not glamorous, and certainly not spiritual or mindful. Yoga was for stretching and it was a way of exercising that was not running. YouTube videos with titles like “Power Cardio Yoga” and “Yoga Cardio Workout” caught my eye, or “Yoga for Weight Loss,” and “Cardio Yoga for Fat Burning”. I felt guilty about not running, guilty for loving every moment of yoga while I was still trying to even like running.
Looking back, the choice of videos tells me not only about what my body craved (intense physical activity), but also about where my mind was willing to go. I avoided videos with too much downtime, or what I saw as unnecessary focus on breathing, stillness, and relaxing the mind.
As a gift from my parents about a year into my practice, I received a yoga mat and classes at a newly opened Bikram yoga studio. I had never felt stronger in my body than I did during the nine or ten months that I practiced there. I had never been more amazed with what my body could do. When I left that studio, I knew it was not likely I would go back. Bikram was never pleasant, as those who have tried it will know, but it was there that I let myself truly feel my body, and it was there that I first realized the meaning of energy in a room. I have never forgotten the first time I viscerally understood that there are forces in the universe that science cannot explain.
I remember the first time I allowed my body to just be there. I was in my first yin yoga class in Bali, already on a journey through my mind and heart that I still see as pivotal to the places life has taken me in the five years since. Yin did not allow me to ignore the mind through quick movement or to hide myself in flexibility. Yin opened my body and forced me to breathe. And I did so, first in an effort to reduce the intensity of physical sensation, and then because I was fascinated with how much my body could give me if I just gave it space.
I have come a long way in 11 years of practice. I have had many teachers, both through YouTube and in real life. I have tried many different styles, and I have learned where yoga comes from. The point of asana, the physical yoga postures, is to breathe. The breath itself is the practice. The body, if you let it, will move with the breath. The breath will move the body. This synchronicity aligns the mind and slows down our experience of the world.
There has been a great deal of yoga practice for me recently, a product of the amount of time I am spending at home since our return to online learning. But unlike this time a year ago, my mind is quieter, my body is more responsive, and my heart is finding it easier to smile at what I have in my life rather than crying out for what is lost.
And for this, I am deeply grateful.
Ubud, Bali, Indonesia – February 2016
Photos, travels, musings, and ideas on education by someone trying to make the world a better and more peaceful place
By Rebecca Michelle 