I-ing and My-ing

[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

Enter your email here to receive Weekly Wide-Awake

back

The shore thirsts, but does not own the ocean that keeps it soft. So, too, the heart and all it loves. – Mark Nepo

I-ing and My-ing are learned.

I-ing and my-ing are learned. We are not born to this earth perpetually focused on ourselves. At a cellular level, we are interdependent. At a communal level, we are interdependent. I want to suggest that even at an individual level, we are interdependent. There is a tension between interdependence and independence. I-ing and my-ing result when independence runs off the rails. I-ing and my-ing result when the lessons of growing up (like sharing, understanding, and compassion) are not learned or forgotten.

I-ing and My-ing means we never have enough.

I-ing and my-ing leaves us in a state of perpetual lack. We don’t have enough and what we do have isn’t good enough. The things we are given are wrong. We never give or serve, because we don’t think we have enough for ourselves and we come first. We are never satisfied under the weight of want and need.

I-ing and My-ing separates us from one another.

No one wants to be around a person who is always I-ing and my-ing. No one. Separation and isolation result from I-ing and my-ing. That is the truth. When we put things over relationships, talking over rather than talking with, and getting over giving we leave others out. Our heart hardens when we fail to see another person. That is a cost of I-ing and my-ing.

I-ing and My-ing does not allow gratitude.

Gratitude is impossible when we are I-ing and my-ing. Gratitude requires we be present in our lives. Gratitude requires we take stock of what we are given and say thank you. That is hard to do in constant state of keeping score, feeling slighted, and manipulating for more. Gratitude requires the soft heart that often hardens in the process of I-ing and my-ing. The gifts of gratefulness – peace, healing, joy, connection – are not received in the rush of I-ing and my-ing.