Back to School Reminders
12 days of coloring belonging
Hi Friends!
“Back to School” is the phrase that strikes horror in the hearts of so many of us…still. This week I was in Target minding my own business in the Tic-Tac aisle only to round the corner into a crayon ambush. Towers of backpacks, notebooks, lunchboxes all reminding us that summer parole is almost over.
Can you tell I hated school? It’s sad. I loved learning, but what I “hated” was that I never felt at ease socially. It led to school-hopping, which made things worse. It eventually led to dropping out and homeschooling myself in high school with my cat and Dostoevsky for company.
Maybe you had a better experience. Maybe you loved school. Maybe you were the prom queen. We are all happy for you. But two key things I’ve learned from working with students is:
Most students experience some form of social adversity. (It’s the norm.) This means that experience is MIXED, and that must be normalized instead of MYTHOLOGIZED by schools’ PR departments and well-meaning parents.
Students who don’t seem like they’re experiencing adversity (prom queens), often are, and are less likely to be checked up on because they don’t “look lonely”. Check up on your prom queens.
Wherever you or your loved-ones are with school love/hate, I want to give you a box of crayons, one every day for the first 12 days of school. It’s the box I wish Crayola made to help us create beautiful social worlds.
Solitude is essential. Scheduling in regular times each day, week and month to intentionally disengage from our social world and re-engage with ourselves is the foundation of authentic connection. I’m starting here to counter-balance the tendency to jump into hyper-connecting with others.
Rather than choosing to “be alone,” we can think of this ancient human practice as choosing to “be with myself.” If we don’t know how to gently make space for ourselves, hook into a deeper reality, listen to what comes up, meet it with warmth, and give ourselves the chance to heal and to imagine, how on earth do we expect to be able to engage well with others?
The unbreakable rhythm of life is in-breath, out-breath; ebb, flow; engagement, disengagement. But our culture does not look at your CV for how many boards you didn’t serve on so that you could hear yourself think. We simply have to organize around this fact of life to save ourselves from burnout and from a shallow relationship with ourselves and ultimately others.
Here are some ideas:
Start small: 5 minutes at some point in the day, get somewhere private—your car, a bathroom stall, the shower….and close your eyes. Just breathe for one minute. Then speak out loud to yourself using your name and ask: “______, how are you really?” or “Omg, wtf?” Just listen to what comes up and respond to yourself like you would to a best friend. *You can also journal to this question with your earbuds in at your desk. Whatever works.
Start medium: Schedule in “white space” to your calendar in the same way you schedule classes and meetings. We are so freaking over scheduled. At the beginning of the month, decide as an individual or as a family where to put the DO NOTHING space. The buffer zones, the margins, the stare-at-the-wall space. And guard it as sacred. If something nonessential tries to take over the space, say you have a family emergency, because at this point, it kind of is. Reward yourself for doing it. Put it on your resume like a punk. Brag about it on social media.
Start big: channel that inner monk and take a 2-day silent retreat (wherever you can, maybe it’s into a different room in your house). Silence and solitude work together to strip away the noise, the chaos, the punishing momentums of the world. *Warning: it can be very uncomfortable at the beginning. You may want to jump out of your skin. But this is precisely how we get back into a settled sense of being at home in our skin! Stick with it. Let yourself sink into the friendly, cosmic order that keeps the earth spinning, dolphins jumping and pine sap running over the bark.
Great stuff on solitude, if you want to explore:
How to be alone music video
How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy by Jenny O’Dell
How to relax by Thich Nhat Hahn (a real-life monk!)
Tomorrow will be the black crayon… See you then, and happy Sunday, everyone!
Cat
P.S.— Woman’s Day has a great article on the A to Zs of back-to-school essentials that I’m happy to have been part of. Here’s a screenshot of the spread, but please find it on newsstands now!
