I’m Grateful for a Change of Pace

It’s late on Saturday night, and it’s been a fairly productive day. I got most of my weekly house chores wrapped up (there’s still a load in the dryer, but they’ll keep), I took down all of the Christmas stuff, I watched a little TV, and I did my grocery shopping for the week. I had dinner in the car on the way home, a 6" vegan pizza. All in all pretty good. Pretty mundane, but pretty good. When I was all done putting groceries away, I had a sit on the couch, and woke up a couple of hours later.

That brings me to now, and realizing at eleven o’clock that I almost missed writing a blog post today, so now I’m torturing my reader with mundane details of a pretty alright day.

Except. Except, how great is all that, huh? After a week of teaching during a pandemic, of trying my best to talk over a mask, of trying to talk over physically distanced students, sat behind ridiculous shields of plastic and cardboard. A week of dancing — metaphorically — to keep them focused as I teach. A week with the desperate uncertainty of a democracy being tested, and then trying to explain the news to curious ten year olds. After all of these things, heck after a normal week with none of these things, how great is a kind of mundane day where you get things done at a fairly relaxed pace? Three big cheers for that!

So if there’s a take-away from all of this — other than the giant take-away of being grateful for a small break in the action — it’s maybe this. If it feels this good to stop the pace of things, maybe don’t forget that you can do this in your classroom, too. What if you said, “Okay, I think we’ve had enough this week (or today). We’re going to stop for a little bit, and just do something nice,”? Because as good as it felt to do that at home today, what if I take the time to do that with my students? Would we all be grateful for a moment like that? How much more effective, how much better, how much more sane would we be after that?

Maybe just stop pushing once in a while.