Inactivity Breeds Complacency

Not long ago I was an active person. Mountain biking, hiking, geocaching, and teaching. I was fortunate enough to spend the last four months in a classroom learning how to be an educator in the most practical of ways. Yes, it was time consuming and most of my hobbies fell by the wayside. That being said, I was focused singularly on the task at hand. I spent my spare timer researching teaching strategies, behavior analysis, and ways to engage students. As a lifelong procrastinator, this was a high point for me. Productivity at its finest. Now here I sit. My student teaching is over and I am left to tread water while I wait for my certification. A driven person would use this time to rediscover his hobbies or further study his ever growing field of study, but here I am.

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Small Miracles

As I was driving through Valley Forge Park the other day, for no real reason I decided to pull into a parking lot. I had some reading that needed to be done and thought this would be as good as any other place to do it.

It was a beautiful, cold but sunny, late-winter afternoon. About 20 minutes into sitting there a young family knocked on my window and asked to use my cell phone. They had locked their keys in their car and waiting for the locksmith in the cold with their 2 year old daughter. I invite them to wait in my car until they could get into their car. It took about an hour and a half for the locksmith to arrive.

If I had not pulled into that parking lot, they may have been in the cold all that time. There is no other reason that I was suppose to be there. It might be a small thing, but I'll take a small miracle any day of the week.

Allow yourself to be open to opportunities and be a part of a small miracles every day.

The Path We Choose Can Choose Us

I was exposed to the poetry of Robert Frost some time ago. Although there are conventional meanings that have been pinned to his work, I maintain a firm stance that everything is open to interpretation. Furthermore, I don't believe in a single right answer. There are very few absolutes in this world. By far my favorite work of Frost is his poem "The Road Not Taken". I've had a steadfast conventional interpretation of this poem for quite some time, but as an education major, my perspective has shifted considerably. It begins by saying that:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth


Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same

I've always considered this to be a choice by the narrator to pick one life path over another, but as I consider multiple intelligences, as outlined by Howard Gardner, I find myself questioning that rationale.  Perhaps is was less of a conscious decision than I originally believed.  What if the narrator was predisposed to a certain way of learning.  Frost takes a naturalistic approach in his poem.  I make this comparison between learning and life path because they run parallel throughout our lives.  The method in which we learn best is as much of a variable in our decisions as the ones that we tend to emphasize (i.e. money, love, convenience).  Perhaps if people were more conscious of their learning style, they might make better decisions.

Regardless, as a teacher I am constantly considering everything I come into contact with in terms of it's educational application.  I recently came across a site created by Coca-Cola on Facebook of all places.  It allows the user to create a song using user defined lyrics and a selection of a couple voices and musical styles.  It even allows for a download of the finished song.  Although a bit simplistic, I think that this could provide a teacher with a valuable resource to use with students.  Personally, I would have been ecstatic if I could study using a song on my ipod.

The site is Crammer Keeper

There are new experiences all around us, but we need to be able to recognize them.

Intentionally Full of Potential

Six months ago, I was sitting on a friend’s porch in University City, Philadelphia, and we had a conversation about living up to our full potential. It is has been a fear of mine that I am not all I should be or doing all I should be, been all I should be or that I’m not doing all I could be to make that happen. We moved on, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head.

Many of us walk through life with the best of intentions. How ever we get frustrated and don’t hold onto that intention long enough to see the right moment to take action. The hardest person to be patient with is ourselves. If we are not willing to be patient and take ownership our intention then the opportunity to take that action will never present itself.

Intention can be fleeting. By making that intention a part of who we are and infusing it as a part of our value system, we can hold that value with us. When the moment to make the transition from potentiality to actualization comes into our life we will be ready to take that step.

“Potentiality becomes actuality through intention when conditions are appropriate." - Dr. David Hawkins

Living a Hands on Life

Life constantly presents decisions that have to be made, from what to do with a day to what to do with the rest of a life. Every decision impacts every other moment of life from then forward. I believe that the only honest way to make that decision is to live it. Commit to the moment and be truly present. This is the what living a hands on existence means. Not letting all of the things that weigh us down to hold us back from being with the people around us, in the situation and an active part of the life we have been given.

Gandhi says to “be the change you want to see in the world.” The challenge of life is to be present and involved in order to make that change real.