After a week back at school with only my fellow teachers, I encountered many people feeling stressed and at the ends of their rope already. We aren’t even fully “back” yet. In an attempt to keep up my attitude of play, I jokingly made a comment that I was going to start spreading glitter wherever I went, metaphorically speaking. Yet it turned into a joke about physically carrying around a jar of glitter and throwing it around on anyone who needed a pick-me-up.
It was my intention today, to sit here and celebrate my own success at maintaining this playful attitude, because we all know: our own attitudes are all we can truly control.
That dreaded email from earlier this week snowballed into a mess I couldn’t clean up on my own. I was ready to sit here and tell you about how awesome it was that I held my attitude together. That I laughed away the tears I would have normally cried. Didn’t go home stressed. Didn’t make my family suffer my bad mood. But in thinking about this post, I found a deeper, more important observation.
People watched me emotionally struggle with an English department dilemma for two days as I traveled around to team meetings and individual meetings, trying to get everyone up to speed on our new curriculum and materials. With any change, comes a variety of bugs that need to be worked out. All par for the course. In each meeting I was met with an equal amount of support and negativity, yet again this is all to be expected.
However on the third day, I was met with a physical challenge regarding materials that had the potential to set me over the edge. Boxes I had spent days unpacking, processing, and delivering to teachers needed to be repackaged and shipped back. We had received some things in error and a new order would be arriving a few weeks into school. I was already on borrowed time and working on a day that was technically still my vacation. But as any good glitter fairy would do, I buckled down to get the job done with as little fight as I could muster.
A multitude of people in the building had time to comment on the unfairness. Had time to tell me to go home and let someone else deal with it. Had time to berate and point fingers at anyone whose fault it might have been. Had time to watch while there was a job to be done. And in all fairness, I wasn’t able to keep all negative comments in my own head. Leakage did occur. But out of all those commenters, only one person took the time to drop what they were doing and help me.
One.
She put her own stresses on a shelf and helped me tackle mine without a second thought. And a project that would have taken me the full day to do myself, only took a few hours. With her help, and then my two administrators who joined in, a mountain became a mole hill. I was home before lunch.
But this, to me, is a lesson in energy. It’s simple science. We can all stand around and point fingers at the source of a problem, or we can just be fixers. We can tackle the problem together and move on. We can set an example of positivity and GRIT. I’m not discounting the fact that we should attempt to prevent these blunders. Of course we should. But mistakes happen. None of us hope they happen. None of us want them to happen. They just do. And often, they happen to us.
If you find yourself having energy to discuss a problem, especially while you physically watch someone tackling it, take a moment to be a helper. A do-er. Someone who takes action for the positive instead of poisons the air in which we live and breathe. It sounds so obvious, yet it’s not our natural reaction in most cases.
We often excuse ourselves out of action. We often think we’re teaching someone a lesson. We don’t want to enable bad behavior. We didn’t make that mistake. We knew it would happen. Now we’ll just sit here and say, “I told you so.”
WE need to make new habits.
