just to let you know. i'm at kahala mall right now. it looks like they're pumping s**t out in front of the whole foods store. the whole parking lot and front of the mall reeks of "leavings." i came inside to the starbucks, bought the obligatory "venti mocha frappuccino" (crap, i don't even particularly like the stuff) and sat down... i'm killing a bit of time until my appointment out this way, writing empty nothings, looking at the upbeat kahala crowd while away their day.
there are a lot of what i would call "business people," guys dressed up in aloha shirts, holding what seem like conferences across the little tables. maybe they are financial specialists trying to calm clients over coffee and scones. and then there are a lot of "kahala moms," always dressed sporty in tank tops and shorts, pushing their decked out strollers, occasionally giving lectures to their misbehaving children, lectures that sound like they are more for the ears of everyone around them than the actual child, lectures that show that they are great parents, and their children are somehow behaving "out of mold": "why are you behaving like that? you know that in our family we never behave like that. settle down, young man." and then, resignedly, they kind of give up the act, just let the kids "stir," and talk with their girlfriends about the kids' activities, relationships, whatever.
i suppose i should consider myself part of this crowd. it is the unspoken privilege of observers and narrators to be "above it all," or at least pretend it's so. who knows, someone may be commenting on me, this shabby looking kid with the wandering eyes and the quiet typing fingers. i suppose i'm not above reproach.
things have been hectic this week. hell, for a while. it's funny. when i'm in the midst of the fray, there are so many things i think i'd like to be doing: writing, practicing taiji, making music, whatever... but when there's a moment of free time, i have a hard time recruiting the attention necessary for much of anything. i waste a lot of time sort of glossing over things, visiting facebook like every ten seconds... i hate that feeling. i feel like i have to refocus myself, but a larger majority of myself just doesn't care enough to do that. there's something comforting, i suppose, in just "washing out," just "vegging" (as was hip to say in my generation)... like water rippling out across my borders.
maybe that's what dreams/aspirations are for: not that we actually reach them, but in the midst of our "business," they serve as a fictionalized counterpoint to allow us to go on. sort of like hope. convince yourself that hope exists, or at the very least, have faith in it, and you could lean out across any abyss holding weights isometric and outstretched, like forever... so i suppose, in a way, i shouldn't feel frustrated about not being able to follow my idling projects, maybe i was never really meant to.
***
i was thinking about teaching, penguins and the bodhisattva path. one paradox of the bodhisattva vow is that it speaks heavily about an "other first" prioritization with regards to salvation. it's not that you save yourself first, and then reach a hand out to the world to "pull it up and out." it's more like you are always lowering yourself so that others may "step on you." which makes me wonder...
i think i understand a bit of it now, though. as a teacher, as a TRUE teacher, you can never think you "KNOW" your subject, and just deliver it like a package to be unwrapped... you have to ALWAYS be like a penguin, continually digesting the world so that you can later regurgitate it to your kids... in other words, you have to continually "relearn" your subject and think of the best way to make it assimilable to your particular students. in a sense, a teacher is a perpetual student.
we assume that the curriculum is a constant, and the student is the variable. but it's not true. the curriculum, what is taught, changes depending upon the nature of the student. so in essence, a teacher continually relearns (or perhaps even learns for the first time) his subject as he teaches his student.
with regards to taiji, for example. sure, i thought i "knew" my forms. i had practiced them to the extent that they had become engrained in my body. but as i tried to teach what i "knew" to my students, i discovered that i had to "relearn" the form in a different way, put a new, accessible vocabulary to it. and in doing this, what i had known of my forms expanded. i came to see different angles to everything...
maybe the bodhisattva path is arranged the way it is because of this very insight. it is a fiction to believe that salvation is a destination, a constant. it is a happening. and you only allow it to happen by constantly readjusting yourself to it, such that it "opens" to both you and your student. salvation IS this very process, this salvific process of bridging two uncertainties...
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