What is guiding our decisions?
Start-of-semester thoughts on mindfulness, transparency, choice, consent, and love
“Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by. In large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions.”
-bell hooks, all about love (p. 88)
Dear beloved readers,
How is your 2024 so far?
Personally, the work year got off to a slow and weird start. My first week back to work I was sick. Friday morning I found myself mired in and weighed down by what I’ll succinctly and vaguely call “administrative details.” At some point, I realized I needed to step out of my office to get unstuck.
I walked into the peace park, mind busy, trying to be mindful of my steps. I began to reign my mind in, repeating in, ease…out, stress…in, calm, out, release…My mind kept flitting away like the butterflies I was passing by, fluttering to administrative details, as I guided it back to my steps and breath.
I had the thought: I need to re-enchant myself.
At that exact moment, I saw an iguana.
They blended in so well that I wouldn’t have seen them, but they are quite large and make a lot of noise when they move. I heard the dry season leaves rustle, and there they were. They bobbed their head a few times, then stopped stoically in the patch of midday sunlight.
As my mind slowly settled and I returned to myself, I found myself returning to my own words, things my past self has written that I needed to be reminded of, specifically on re-enchanting education, which in the moment meant re-enchanting myself. Sometimes we write to share with others, but maybe sometimes we are writing to our future selves, something we know we will need to be reminded of in the future.
It is so easy to get bogged down in this world, by the little heavy stuff as much as the big heavy stuff. The big heavy stuff (like major life and world events) is so much, but it’s often the little heavy stuff that adds up and really takes a toll (of course, it’s a combination of both). The little heavy stuff is like every day picking up a few pebbles in your pocket which doesn’t seem like a lot until one day you realize you can barely walk, are tipping over, weighed down, immobilized.
Mindfulness practice helps us put it down, or at least be aware that we are carrying it and can choose to let it go. With each mindful breath or step, we can release some of the weight, some of the pebbles that have accumulated.
With this breath, right now.
A few weeks ago I wrote about how meditation is about returning. Part of this return is guiding. In the moment when you notice that your attention has wandered, you gently guide it back to your point of focus. It is about returning, and it is about guiding, gently, like you are trying to free a butterfly that has accidentally gotten stuck inside the house (living in Costa Rica, this is something I practice often, in literal terms :).
The iguana also served as a guide, a mindfulness bell. In the moment I needed a reminder of life beyond mundane stressful details, the iguana showed up, stoic and stunning. The iguana guided me back, away from the stress and reminded me of the beauty available to me in that moment. They were a mindfulness bell, pulling me out of the busyness of my mind into what was real and right in front of me.
Part of the purpose of Enchantable is engaging in public pedagogy, as thinking out loud and in community about teaching and learning and life, and sharing pedagogy and praxis in a public way. It is taking some of the things we are learning, thinking about, talking about, and doing in the classroom and beyond it, and sharing them with a wider community. In this spirit, I wanted to share with you some of my start-of-semester thoughts.
Every semester, themes come up for me around and beyond classes and teaching. As the new semester starts, what feels alive are themes of decision-making, transparency, consent, and choice.
I am thinking a lot about the question: What is guiding our decisions?
There are many components of decision-making: the process and who is involved are hugely important. But what I am thinking about here is the driving force: what is the reasoning, the rationale, and at the center of a decision-making process?
Living within capitalism, so often decisions are driven by money. How can we make the most money, or in non-profit settings, how can we make do with the least amount of money. This also happens a lot with technology. We might let the available technology drive our decision (such as how we are teaching or offering or sharing something) rather than asking things like:
What would this decision look like if we centered well-being?
How would we do this if we put learning at the heart (rather than the available technology or lowest cost)?
If resources are a constraint, how can we be as creative as possible with the resources we have (without putting more burden on people)?
How can we decide from a place of love rather than fear?
While I am thinking about this with respect to my own life and work, I wonder if this question feels relevant to you, dear reader. What is guiding your decisions? What is at the center? And is that what you want it to be?
Other themes that are alive for me right now are around transparency, consent, and choice, and their relationship to liberation, in teaching and pedagogy but also beyond, in relationships, and in our lives in general. Transparency, consent, and choice are core principles of unschooling and deschooling movements, and principles that are important to my pedagogy and life (because also, part of unschooling and deschooling is seeing the interbeing of teaching and learning and life, that these are not separate spheres).
Transparency is liberatory. By transparency, I just mean being clear, honest, truthful. Transparency doesn’t mean that you always say everything out loud. It doesn’t mean you don’t have boundaries - but it means you are clear when you do.
Consent and choice are related yet distinct. Consent means non-coersion, it means having a choice and being able to choose. Choice means having options, and being able to select among them.
Thinking about transparency also had me asking the question: where am I not being as transparent as I could be? Where might I be hiding something, even implicitly or unintentionally? Where could I be more clear, truthful, open?
I may have more to write about these themes as the semester rolls on, but for now, I am just sharing them as thematically what is simmering as I enter this phase of the year, in my teaching but also my life and relationships.
This week is the second anniversary of Thich Nhat Hanh’s passing, his return to Mother Earth. In the Vietnamese tradition, this is the end of the two-year grieving period and he now becomes an ancestor. If you have been reading Enchantable for a while, you have seen his influence in my life and work, and know that he is one of the greatest influences of my life (the opening paragraphs about mindfulness being a present example). I bow in honor of my teacher’s transition to ancestor.
This week also marks a major astrological shift with Pluto’s move into Aquarius. Pluto, the farthest planet1, changes signs slowly, every 15-20 years or so. From what I have read from my favorite astrologers, this monumental shift has the potential to shake loose old power structures and move towards collectively liberating ones. May we work with this potent energy, and may it be so.
As the semseter starts, I return to my own words and re-enchanting myself so that I might re-enchant my teaching. I will revisit my pedagogical invitations and some of my favorite inspirations such as bell hooks. This year on Enchantable I want to write more about love, such as more-than-human love stories and friendship love stories. I leave you today with a few more quotes from bell hooks’ all about love:
“The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be.
Without justice, there can be no love.”
-bell hooks, all about love
With love and care,
Stephanie
Yes, Pluto was downgraded as a dwarf planet some years ago but this doesn’t change its astrological significance in most traditions.