Clarity for Teachers: Day 13
‘Don’t get caught in self-importance, but listen with a peaceful mind.’
Oh dear, I think to myself, as I look at today’s card. Because I know there’s nothing like self-importance to trip me up, to trap me into foolishness.
When I was nineteen, I swapped books in a hostel in Athens with a backpacker from some Ivy League school and came away with a copy of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. One scene from that book stuck in my memory. It’s a long time since I read it, so I could have it wrong, but there’s a guy in the back seat of a car, beating another guy who he only just met, except that in his head all that anger flying through his fists is actually directed at the man his sister lost her virginity to, years earlier. I think of that scene whenever there’s an excess in someone’s reaction, whenever there’s a force that seems to belong somewhere else than in the moment when the reaction is happening. Who is he really lashing out at? I wonder. What scene is replaying in her head?
I can’t name the scene, but I know that the situation in which there’s most likely to be an excess in my reaction is when some part of me feels like I’m being treated as if I’m stupid. That’s where my self-importance kicks in, where I’m likely to lash out, to have a hurtful force in my words.
One thing that’s surprised me, writing these daily commentaries, is how often the material of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood comes to the surface. I’ve written elsewhere about the path from my mid-twenties into the work with which I’ve been associated, but I can’t think that I’ve written or thought this much about what came before that, or not in a long time. I suppose it’s natural, when the theme has to do with teaching and being a teacher, that it brings up memories of those years in which teachers presided over large parts of life.
So thinking about this reaction I know too well — attack as a form of defence, triggered by the sense that I’m being treated as a fool — the first thought that comes is how much of my identity is invested in cleverness, in knowing the right answer, in that source of status which can be the consolation of a bright kid in a school environment, especially a bright kid who is socially awkward or otherwise at odds with his surroundings.
As a grown-up, as a writer and a teacher, much of what I do comes from being able to step beyond the safety of that investment: to be kind to the kid in me who needs to be clever, but also to write and think and feel from beyond the place of cleverness. But none of us are grown-ups all the time — there’s always a weak spot, a sore point, and this is mine. When I feel I’m being treated like an idiot, it can be like the foundations are falling away: there’s a sense of panic, because if I don’t have the safety of intelligence, or if that’s not acknowledged, then what else do I have?
Maybe you get why today’s card got me groaning. It’s not comfortable, owning this stuff, putting it in writing.
Then there’s a voice in me that wants to mitigate. The town I grew up in, the schools I went to — they didn’t offer much encouragement for the kind of life that was calling me, the ways of being that I was in search of. In our late teens, my best friend and I would set off on all-night walks, inspired by a novel we’d read by Aidan Chambers. When the bass player in my friend’s band found out, he said, ‘Who d’you think you are? Do you think you’re special or something?’ He was only repeating the message — mostly implicit, sometimes explicit — that we’d had from teachers, careers advisors and most of the other grown-ups around us. To carry some spark of life and curiosity and passion through that environment, a certain self-forged sense of your own importance was necessary, however absurd its early expressions may have looked.
I’m not playing the four Yorkshiremen here, by the way! I grew up in a house full of books, my parents had very different backgrounds but had lived all over the country and experienced a lot of things that lay outside of the local reality many of my friends were growing up with, the church gave me a network of adults of different ages who were neither my teachers nor my family, and there was always Radio 4 playing in the kitchen. Besides, Yorkshire was down south, as far as we were concerned.
I guess I want to own the not-unhealthy role that self-importance, or something like it, can play in a certain kind of adolescence — and having done so, in all kindness to my younger self, to let go of the traces of it that remain. Because it’s like a plaster cast on a fracture that long ago healed.
Don’t get caught, the advice says. Notice it arising and gently sidestep the trap.
‘Do you realise that, at this moment, the woman I love is walking barefoot across the desert?’ That’s apparently what Eric Berne, the author of Games People Play, suggested as a question that could interrupt any attempt to lure you into a game. Best not to try that version on your spouse. But it’s something like that I’m looking for.
As far as I’ve got with it, these days, the trick is to roll into the situation in which it feels like I’m being taken for a fool — to play the fool and have fun with it. That way I spare myself the heat in the chest that lingers after I’ve let myself get indignant, that costs way more than it’s worth, and I can find a way back to that place of listening with a peaceful mind.
Västerås, 17 March, 2020
This is the thirteenth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
