I am currently nestled in a checkpoint now. My first semester as a paid teacher. After logging in long hours of work, and longer hours of solitude at home, I have finished my the first half of my first year of teaching. Not only is this the first 6 months in a new profession, but the first six months in a new city within a new stage in life.
At first, it all felt like a terrible vacation. I was a new kid in a new city with a new job, and while I have developed a recently appreciated degree of independence in my college years, it didn't feel sufficient enough to take on Richmond. I felt like I was thrown a degree, then I was thrown into a stage of life I was ill equipped to take on. I was prepared, but I wasn't ready, and as time went on, I felt more and more behind the 8-ball of the life I feel I have been called to lead.
However, this wasn't because I wasn't looking at the task at hand, but instead I viewed the task through a birds-eye and entirely too consequential view. I thought that I was the epicenter of my, and my student's, existence. As time went on, I discovered my own insignificance in the environment I laid claim to. Richmond's lights wouldn't go out because I didn't have a social life yet, and my students weren't really mathematicians who were being disenfranchised by my green-horned nature in the educational system.
A friend of mine wisely put it this way;
"For good kids, the teacher in the classroom makes no difference. A students are A students in solitary confinement and F students are F students in an environment of academic enlightenment."
He wasn't saying that a tiger can't change his stripes, but that it wasn't my job to change them. Similarly, this attitude pervaded my thinking in other outlets. People weren't leaving me in my apartment on friday nights, I simply didn't have a place to go yet and people to keep me company there.
After a long period of needless responsibility for circumstances, I became free from my own egotistical worldview. Instead of taking on the plight of my own life, I decided to opt out of ultimate responsibility and live as a man in a world.
A man. I still find this more as an adjective than a noun, and I grapple with finding my place in its meaning.
Side note aside, I can plainly see the direction of my own growth, and I am pleasantly excited about the future in its embrace. Granted, the embrace includes a tight grip. I have to be uncomfortable with certain area's of my life and I can't skirt away from certain areas of deficiency.
The most glaring one being that of a selfish person. I have been expecting people to reach out to me, give to me, and to provide me with relationship. I haven't been focused on giving, and I haven't been showing any inclination to serve others. While some points of life require us to be served, I haven't exactly been the catalyst in getting out of that place. If anything, I've been slowing the reaction down.
Which brings me to my goal; to give. My life isn't hampered with any deficiency outside of my own relational beggar entitlement. This requires maturity in breaking free from. I need to enter a room of people not thinking about who can be my next partner in crime, but rather what I can offer those within its walls.
One semester down.
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