You know the old adage where the shoemaker’s children are the ones without shoes? I’m certainly a member of this school. Being a teacher for many years, the philosophy of learning that I firmly believed in was spiral teaching – reviewing everything learned for a few seconds each day and gradually adding new concepts to the queue. Throughout my thirty years in education it is the only method I’ve ever found to be tried and true. Spiral teaching results in learning that becomes part of a person. The concepts just don’t live fleetingly in the mind, but are actually assimilated into the person’s being and are drawn upon automatically, without thinking.
All that being said, here I sit, the classic example of the shoemaker. I was made aware of this in a passage I read this morning on simplicity, compassion, and patience. I also need to add surrender to this list. I spent a great deal of time last year exploring these concepts and “learning” them. Yet, this year, Valentine’s Day weekend, I’m no better off than I was last year on this very same weekend. All week, in the back of my mind, I’ve been asking myself, “How can that be?” Then, a piece of wisdom shared by Mark Nepo in an essay reminded me about spiral learning.
I went about my journey last year changing and growing and learning to be a better me, but every time I came upon a new piece of learning, I’d drop the old and rush headlong into trying to master something new. How did I ever expect hard things like patience and surrender to ever be automatic to me if I dropped them by the wayside on my quest for something new?
Today I’m reminded that patience and surrender must be worked on for a few minutes everyday and not dropped on the side of the road when I’m being enamored by new things. Within minutes, in another book, I came across this:
“The hardest part of surrendering is remembering to do it.” ~ Melody Beattie
That was a “duh” moment for me. Recently I got myself caught back in the sticky web of a relationship I had worked so hard last year to surrender. One small blip on the radar and there I am, mired down, feet and hands stuck in the web, wondering, “How did I ever end up back here?” Duh. The hardest part of surrendering is remembering to do it.
When I was in college some forty years ago I got a handmade gift from someone who is still today my very best friend and spiritual mentor. On the night that I surrendered my life to God, an old hymn was being sung. (As my other best friend would say, it was my “come to Jesus” moment- I love this friend for lightening up the heavy times in my life.) That night I was brought to my knees, with tears streaming down my face. My friend held my hand as we sang the hymn together. Her sister was an artist. A few weeks later, for my birthday, my friend presented me with the song lyrics, framed, and done in pen and ink, with the sides of the pages decorated in artwork. The name of the song was “I Surrender All”.
For the past thirty eight years that picture hung in every bedroom I ever slept in so I would not forget the huge moment that changed my life. In November of 2010 I repainted my current bedroom. I put away all my wall decor to redo the room. Somehow that picture never made it back onto the wall. I haven’t woken up to that message in over a year. And I wonder why I’m back in the sticky web. One more time – “duh”.
And so, as another day goes by, I know what I’m doing as soon as I get back home on Monday, and …I have written.
~ Mark Nepo – The Book of Awakening
(Haha – no pun intended, but once again, it’s fun that it’s there.)
Leave a Reply