Dispatch from Bellingham, May 23

Some thoughts on a very pleasant Spring day in Bellingham.

It has been a good day, perhaps one of the best so far this year.  Three events made it so, two of which were unexpected.  It was the last, however, that helped me articulate why the first event was so meaningful.

I had come to the Starbucks Coffee just over the hill from the campus from Village Books where I had enjoyed an author reading, one I went to mostly out of curiosity, tinged with a bit of nostalgia.  The author, John Gierach, is a well-known writer of books about fly fishing read from his latest book “No Shortage of Good Days.”  The chapter he chose was about going on book promotion tours, and was filled with dry wit and sometimes “belly-laugh” humor.  As I am a book addict, I ended up buying one of his first books, just to see if he is in the same league as a few of the other outdoors writers I’ve read in the past, like Havilah Babcock, the legendary South Carolinian poet of upland game hunting.  I had tried fly-fishing briefly while in South Carolina, and I’d been enchanted by the lyrical, almost Zen-like, fishing segments of the film, “A River Runs Through It,” which had starred Brad Pitt.  I gave up fishing when I moved to Pennsylvania, but the memories of my childhood outings with Grandpa John linger…hence the nostalgia.

I carried a book into Starbucks…as I always do…and found a seat next to a young man working on his laptop.  He glanced over and asked me what the book, “Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth” was about.  Our conversation moved quickly to many related topics and to his goal of graduating with a degree in bioanthropology.  Somehow, I managed to mention Joseph Campbell, and recalled his advice that one should “follow one’s bliss.”  And that triggered an almost instantaneous recollection of what the first event of the day really had meant to me and why I have been missing teaching so much since I retired.

It has to do with “flow,” sometimes called “peak experience” in pop psychology.  Though I’ve felt it a few times in my teaching career, those few moments have been transcendental and transformative.  To the young man, I explained that there were times when I would begin a lecture and then lose awareness of doing it until the end of the period, when it would seem like I was coming awake from a kind of dream.  It was as though the lecture…or perhaps I should call it the story…was telling itself through me.  I don’t think I was aware of the students as this happened; certainly I cannot recall trying to notice their faces or any indication that they were listening.  No…at the risk of sounding like some “new age” guru, it was as though I was channeling the story from outside me.  My “ego”…the “me” was unimportant.  These were rare times.  In the terms used by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I was in a state of “flow.”  My attention, my awareness, was in the story, and nowhere else, and time and space faded to unnoticeable.  

I’ve often called myself a “story-teller.”  As many texts on teaching will tell you, this is NOT the most efficient way to involve the largest number of students in a class.  In fact, as I said, they disappear from my consciousness.  But there are some who do respond…not to me, but to the story.  They, I reach, or at least I think I do.  Some have told me so.  And I do admit, it is a bit of a selfish moment, a private epiphany.  Yet it is those rare moments that provide the energy and desire to keep telling the story and to share it with others using more of the “educational” techniques that may reach more than that rare few who resonate with me.

So…to the first event of the day…a talk about dinosaurs for the Bellingham Senior Center.  An hour cobbled together from lecture notes from my classes, trying to explain why birds are considered dinosaurs.  Doing it, while not a full-fledged transcendental moment, managed to reawaken the sense of magic that I could feel when I taught.  And the 4 folks who came seemed to enjoy it, and that also brought me satisfaction.  Being in front of an audience, telling the story, is where I am most authentically me.  And it is there, in rare but precious moments, time stops, and the story takes over.  Indeed, it has been a good day.