Looking Away

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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In exchange for the promise of security, many people put a barrier between themselves and the adventures in consciousness that could put a whole new light on their personal lives. – June Singer

Reasons to Not Look Away.

There is so much from which to look away.

I get it. Paying attention in our lives and in our world can hurt. Some days, I live the bumper sticker, “If you are not pissed off, you are not paying attention.” Being pissed off and angry is no way to live. Looking away can be self preservation, salve for the wounds, and burying your head in the sand comfort. Looking away can happen on an individual and global basis. It can be the inability or lack of desire to hold the mirror up to our ourselves or our world. Being able to look away is a privilege. I want to suggest that looking away, at the end of day, does not cure overwhelm, cynicism, and fear. In fact, it makes it all worse.

Looking away does not solve anything.

Looking away is not the easy way out. Looking away does not make us healthier. Looking away does not absolve us of the responsibility to do something. Looking away does not treat the real cause of the illness. Looking away does not connect and build. Looking away is worse than lazy. It is indifference, which at the end of the day looks very similar to hate and cruelty. Looking away says, “We know this is wrong, and we don’t care.”

Our children and their children need us to pay attention.

We have to develop the instinct to consider our decisions from the perspective of our children, and their children, and their children. We have to live lives of where our children see us caring for ourselves and others. They pay attention to it all. We can’t look away from our future. We must take the long view.

Something happens to our soul when we look away.

When we look away, a slow death happens. We become numb. We blame, excuse, find fault, overlook, forget, and isolate. A rot of the soul happens. Slowly. Overtime. It does not have to be that way.

There is hope in paying attention together.

Paying attention is the opposite of looking away. Paying attention is easier together. Paying attention together shares the load of giving a damn. Paying attention together can actually be fun – working on a cause lifts people up. Paying attention can bring meaning to mechanical lives.