The Power of Calm…

Have you ever been swimming in the ocean and found yourself pulled further and further from the shoreline no matter how hard you paddled?  This happened to my sons and me at the beach in Ecuador over Spring Break.

We were ok because we were not being pulled under, and we all knew how to navigate waves breaking over our heads.  But we didn’t feel ok, because suddenly we realized we could not get back to where we wanted to go.  And we wanted out NOW!

For a moment I panicked.  I had visions of my boys struggling to stay afloat as they drifted further out to sea.  I saw Louis Zamperini being circled by sharks…  I thought about The Pirates of the Caribbean sailing off the edge of the earth…  I remembered hearing about swimming in a line parallel to the shore in order to get oneself out of the draw of the waves, and I thought about the waves I’d seen driving up along the coast… they stretched as far as the eye could see.  We’d have to swim to Colombia to get ourselves outside the reach of these waves!  My heart began to pound, and I slowly became aware of a voice reminding me to breathe.  Slowly, my mind began to clear (while my heart continued pumping furiously), and I began to entertain the possibility that we would be all right.

We were lucky that there were people nearby, one of whom swam my 8-year-old to shore and another of whom summoned a lifeguard to meet my 10-year-old and me.  As the lifeguard passed a buoy on a rope to my son and swam with us on a diagonal back to shore, he spoke to me in Spanish.  I could not understand a word of it.  But watching him flatten his hands out in front of himself and move them slowly toward the water, I figured he must have been telling me to remain calm.

Later, I began to think about the forces at work that day which all came together to bring us safely back to shore.  I felt a swelling of gratitude for the kindness of strangers and the preparedness of the lifeguards, for the bravery and strength of my boys, but in hindsight the force that mattered the most was the one that allowed me to remain calm.

Sometimes teaching can feel like swimming in the ocean.  It’s a lot of fun, first of all.  We are greeted by waves of enthusiastic students, and we watch them constantly to see where they are headed and what they will do next. Occasionally it can start to take your breath away, in the midst of report writing, keeping up with technological advancements, curriculum development, and parent-teacher conferences.  Sometimes I start to feel like I might be in danger of getting pulled so far away from where I want to be that I may never get back.

And then I remember Dawn’s reminder to us in ELD at the beginning of the year: “Lean in.”  I lean, and my fabulous co-teacher leans right back.  My wonderful team leans back.  I take deep breaths.  And slowly but surely I regain the sense that everything will be ok.  And it is so much more than ok.  But the most important thing is that I am able to remain calm enough to realize it.