Expanding!

As a teacher, I hear a lot of interesting, funny, and brilliant things from my students. Some of them stick with me for a long time. I still laugh about the time I was telling a class about something that happened to me on my drive to work, and a student very earnestly asked, Where do you work? 

Years ago, as a journal prompt, I asked students to create an anti-bucket list, or a list of things they were not interested in doing. I made one myself, and one of the items on my list was to run a marathon. I was a runner at the time, but I saw absolutely no reason to ever run that far.

However, not long after creating that list, a friend convinced me to train for and run a marathon with her. (I'm easily persuaded 🤷‍♀️). It ended up being a rewarding experience. One that I have never felt compelled to repeat, but rewarding nonetheless.

A couple years later, I pulled up that writing prompt for my class and "run a marathon" was still on my list of things I would never do. "Oh, I need to update this," I said. "That's no longer true. I did end up running a marathon!"

A student observed, "You like to do big things, don't you?" She went on to cite the fact that I was pursuing a PhD as further evidence. 

The observation surprised me because my answer to that question was not an immediate yes, that wasn't the way that I saw myself. This offhand comment is something that I have often pondered over. Do I like doing big things? I certainly like to have goals, but there was something about this assessment that never really rang true to me. It must be the English teacher in me to care so much about word choice, but it was the word "big" that didn't feel right. 

It wasn't until I read a sentence in the poet Maggie Smith's book Dear Writer, that I realized what the right word was. She writes: "Our lives are expandable, endlessly expandable, too."

Yes! I thought and underlined that sentence. It's not that I necessarily like to do big things, but I wholeheartedly believe in Maggie Smith's sentiment about the endless expandability of our lives, and I like to do things that expand me. It's a hopeful feeling to know that we can continue to grow and change and be shaped by experiences.

It's common for a new parent to suddenly think, What was I doing with all my time before I had kids?! I certainly thought this myself. But now I see that it wasn't that I was squandering my time before, but rather being a mom expanded my life. The same is true with my grad school work; it has expanded my life.

One of my favorite writers, Gretchen Rubin, gives the advice "Choose the bigger life," as a way to make decisions easier. I think that she's saying the same thing: choose the things in life that will expand you and make your life richer. Often these things are hard. Running a marathon, being a mother, navigating a PhD program: all hard. But there is delight to be had in things that challenge us, that make us work, that test our limits. 

What bothered me about the word "big" in that student's statement was that it implies considerable size or intensity. Reading a book, taking a morning walk, playing a board game with my family--these might all seem small in scale, but I think they are also ways of choosing the bigger life because they are just as expansive to my life as the "big" things.  

Earlier this week, The Daily Yonder newsletter talked about how life has perhaps become too convenient when many of the tasks that we used to toil over and think about can now be offloaded to technology or generative AI. But to what end? Is this giving us the bigger life? Can there be meaning in a life that's never hard? The article ended with a young man stating, "I want everything to be hard and I want it to be deeply rewarding."

I read this two days before I completed the oral portion of my candidacy exams. These exams are the culmination of four years of taking graduate classes, nine months of intense, self-directed reading, and three months of difficult writing. In short, it was hard work. But there has also been much delight in the process, and I can see how in many ways I am a different person and teacher because of it. 

When I started this process, I vowed that I would not be a victim to the arrival fallacy: assuming that you will be happy once you arrive at a milestone or a goal. In order to avoid this, you must find joy in the hard work and in the smaller moments.

As soon as I passed, I was elated! And relieved! But two hours later I was on soft pretzel duty in the athletic boosters concession stand at my daughter's high school and ready to watch her perform in the band's halftime show. Both were delightful and both gave me a bigger life.