On Being a Hummingbird...

My husband just made a job change--not career change per se, but change of employment. Now I am considering the same thing. At first, I was adamant about feeling called to leave the place where I work now. I felt compelled to find something less stressful and less likely to expose me to so many people every day as this year my health took a downward spike due to my "catching" every bug that came anywhere near me, a thing that I find happening a lot since my thyroidectomy and fibromyalgia diagnosis. At the same time, I know my superintendent has been praying heartily that God might open a door for me to stay and continue the band program. It is a position that--until a program is well-established--is hard to fill.

All that is really clear to me now is that no matter what I do, I am supposed to be more singularly focused and slower paced than I've been this year. Currently I teach middle school math, high school drama, elementary school band and middle school computers. The diversity is proving to be stretching me too thin. Preparation for and energy demands during all these classes are stretching me to a snapping point.

What I've learned from a couple of articles that have "randomly" come into my bathroom reading material:

First, quotes from an article called "Direct Your Attention" in Experience Life Magazine, a monthly publication put out by my health club, which is a place I never have time to go anymore, because if I go there, I can't be doing anything else but that. But to this, the article says:
"Forget multitasking. Forget autopilot. The biggest rewards come from skillfully focusing our attention on just one thing at a time...Paying focused attention to one--and only one--thing at a time can yield rich rewards...Attention is like a flashlight. When we use it in the most efficient way, we shine the narrow beam of light on a single object, and we can see it clearly." It goes on to note that "in our fast-paced, high-demand world," our multifaceted brains often feel driven to attention splitting activity. One of the most common ways we split our attention is when we try to do one external focus activity (help a kid with homework) at the same time we do an internal focus one (grade papers and/or make a shopping list, etc.) I am SO guilty of this type of thing! "When we split our attention in this way--giving half our focus over to our own internal landscape, we tend to miss a lot of what is coming at us." What's more "we are less capable of enjoying the beauty around us. We also suffer because our attention gravitates toward the future or past, instead of remaining in the present."
Three large obstacles to retraining our focus: self-preoccupation--andthat being not selfishness so much as "what do I need to do now" type self-preoccupation, passive entertainment, and multi-tasking.
Nice to know I'm not the only one who has these obstacles laying prominently around. But boy, do I have them!

As for the second resource guiding my reflections on change, it is a little meditation book, Everyday Serenity, by David Kundtz. As I delve further into it's text, I'm sure I'll have many more quotes I'd take from it, but for starters, I'll just note one thing he quoted and review his reflection on it. "There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.--Milan Kundera." Kundtz says of this quote: "My guess is that they are secret because we have not noticed them before. As recently as a generation ago, these bonds were a common, intuitive understanding. People lived their lives with a conscious realization of the balance between slowness and remembering, between speed and forgetting. They knew that leisure was a necessary part of a balanced life. They knew that if you moved too fast you were bound to forget something." Now, to me, that "forgetting" represents lost efficiency, lost joy, lost relationships--not just a lost set of keys, although lost keys do happen a lot at my house.

I remember once reading a book on spiritual discipline by Stephen Foster in which this subject was handled from an economic bent. He proposed that capitalism, by its very nature, demands constant expansion or else as a system it must die. The problem was that we are no longer an expanding country, not in terms of either geography nor population. Therefore, the expansion must occur in each individual life--expand the hours of productivity, expand credit to keep people buying goods to keep pressing the market back into a state of growth. Now I'm no economist, but I can certainly see a change from my parents' lives to mine in terms of an "economy" that invades more and more of my so-called "free" time, more than it did theirs. I remember long summers--open time for both me and my dad, who was a teacher. Now schools are talking about going an extra two hours a day and an extra five weeks a year in response to this "expansion" mind-set. The answer is no longer to look at the quality of instruction, but to simply increase its quantity and make some hopeful assumptions about the outcome of that expansion. And I am noticing this as a teacher. Many believe the teachers would not promote the opinion that the quality of instruction at school needs to go up even as the accountability for a student's good attitude needs to go up at home. But many teachers I know do say these things. Unfortunately, most decisions about most things are driven by the economy. The almighty dollar, as they say. But, everything I'm reading lately about these types of expansion and the double, sometimes triple-duty such expansion requires (how else do you get it all done, for God's sake?) is that any benefits are killed by the costs. Lost health, lost efficiency, lost personal engagement--we deceive ourselves by trying to do what "always worked before." It only works if you have room to grow, and we don't. So now what?

In my little part of the world what does it mean? It means I learn to do with less materially speaking and hope my country's need for that 12-14 hour day from me isn't as desperate as it is presented to me. I will in exchange rediscover what it feels like to be 100% involved in any given moment. To give my all to one thing instead of a little bit to many things. I will get my health back, my peace back, my family back, my desire to wake up and face a new day back. Most of all, I will confirm to myself and to the world that I can and do make a committment of 100% of myself to something, anything.

Years ago, God, You inspired a friend to pray for me, and she prayed that I quit trying to be a hummingbird, that I let You make me an eagle instead. (My husband saw her just today, in fact, and to see her is a rarity for us.) I should call her and thank her again for listening to You, for praying in the face of my need then. Thank You that You are not truly finished with a prayer until it is completely answered. Her prayer is still wafting up to You, for I still need even now. Maybe this time when I try to make a change, it will stick!