There is truth that rings in saying you are what you are when scientifically theorizing.
However, there is that uniquely given force throughout each of our journeyed environments where we must strive to choose, to make what we need to become, in able to serve our individually given purpose.
This innate factor, I know either saved me or put me in reflective moments upon used up energy and unnecessary troubles that perhaps could have helped me to fine-tune or speed up my maturing make-up had I been placed within a different time and place instead.
What feeds your heart, mind, body, and spirit?
This constant feeding, I have been mindful to satiate my becoming but even more, in my golden years, to nowadays, a refining must.
Even an ape looks at me in a zoo through a glass window as if to say, You are there and here I am, with just a slow turn of the head.
Clearly, evolution brings to mind, Why are apes of today still, well, apes?
The complexity of the mind connecting itself to the heart and body, igniting the spirit, explains our hierarchy as homo sapiens. Yes?
Translation? Wise, sensible, discerning- humans.
I think back to all the schools I’ve attended and know, as I’ve claimed in a previous entry, to be thankful that I didn’t stay long enough to be transformed by the minds of those around me.
There was a time where influences were heavy and had I stayed just a bit longer, my mindset now would most likely have become altered differently.
My very first school was in the Philippines. Somehow, I had skipped kindergarten and so, found myself right into first grade. This may be perhaps why I laugh to myself even to this day when I see those wonderful sayings about All I Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten written by Robert Fulghum:
Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that are not yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life- learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup- they all die. So do we. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned-the biggest word of all-LOOK.
Darn it. Oh, well. Here I am.
Here’s to being the kindergartner I never was each day. And, so, I have had to learn about the world a little bit differently, a little at a time.
I do remember the Dick-and Jane book sent to me in the Philippines, I believe, from my maternal grandmother.
Stop. Look. And, listen.
Interesting. So metaphorical to this day.
That LOOK part. I’m still doing.
And, well, the STOP and LISTEN? Amongst many other lessons mentioned, I’m still learning.
Along with proper English, I learned about discipline and training of expected behavior in first grade.
Kneeling on salt rock with books held up to the side. Truth be told on that one. Not recalling why I walked in later than everybody midday, I remember everyone had already been seated while I immediately took note of a classmate demonstrating what had been, until that moment, just spoken to me as a serving warning for the rest of us.
While perhaps many would see this as cruel, I recall the eyes of my classmate. He wasn’t at all expressing physical hurt. The eyes told a more hurt ego, embarrassed of his actions that led him to now have me see him this way.
Finally arriving to America, missing time in school, my school age caught up with me as my again, maternal grandmother, who we found ourselves living with upon arrival here, had made sure I attended second grade and not straight to third.
A good call on my grandmother’s behalf as I spoke very little English and I had missed quite some time of schooling upon our transitional moves from the south of Philippines to the main part, Manila, before even arriving to now, my homeland for over forty years.
Emigrating does not happen overnight.
Weirdly, I found myself taking a bus in front of our neighborhood school only to be bused to a school up north.
At this shortly attended school, I learned the good heart of a teacher who, when I couldn’t actually read (upon me raising my hand and volunteering, thinking of course I could!), she immediately got me a volunteer to privately help me outside of class.
Although brief, had this not occurred, I perhaps would have thought all teachers with peachy skin had no care for the darker skin tones, a noticing of another teacher presented to me without my asking soon enough.
With another family needing to move in with our grandmother, we found ourselves in another city.
Although only about an hour from where my grandmother’s home resided, what was mostly people of color became the only people of color (other than another family that I recall lasted about a month) being us.
I only became aware of color because moving to a new school to finish second grade, I was immediately drawn to Stop, Look, and Listen to how our skin color affected how others saw and treated us.
In my first week, a blonde girl with her hair in a single pony tail walked over to me during recess and said to me, “I’d play with you but I’m not allowed to.”
Even just a short time having settled into this area, my heart actually understood and willingly accepted. Quite strange and yet, comforting, I felt sorry for her. She was missing out on me and I felt she knew it.
Finishing second and then, third grade, one up the hill and the other, down the hill, gave me the clarity of knowing neither schools could ignore I was different.
I still raised my hand. Sometimes I got called on; sometimes I didn’t.
Fourth grade was a blur. I think this is mainly because I was hardly there. I returned to this school in sixth grade but only to find myself in a different neighborhood for my fifth grade year.
In this fifth grade neighborhood, while my race didn’t change, it seemed evident that this was the time I started to realize perhaps I didn’t fit anywhere.
I went from a predominantly dominant race on one end of the spectrum to the same but other end of the spectrum.
I learned in fifth grade that one who becomes your good friend can be turned against you by others to leave you once again, in the comfort of you just being you.
Because I had moved around so much, my attendance undoubtedly and understandably impacted my academic standings.
I started to take note of mainly C grades- that marking of you as “average”.
I recall a kid named, Trevor, who introduced himself to me. I immediately took note of how articulate he was in his speech, no doubt withholding a good level of intellect.
As we walked up to our classes after recess, he explained to me he would not be seeing me in class since he was placed in Honors.
I was not impressed with him telling me this nor did I feel intimidated had that been his intent.
Quietly, to myself, I was annoyed by his way of stating some seemingly glorious status of being placed in such a class.
From his way of expressing and how he spoke quite confidently, I knew Honors suggested I was placed below such “selection”.
By the end of the day, taking a quick note of those who were stepping out of his class and mine as he once again approached to talk to me outside, I recall quietly being bothered with the reality I had to accept.
Blonde girls with ponytails were coming out of his class. I quietly understood without needing to be told.
Some things you just get.
By sixth grade, having lost a dear brother over the summer, I learned anger. I had to quickly understand I didn’t like that part in me. Interestingly enough, I recall watching The Hulk. Bruce Banner, I valued, understood, and quietly tried to emulate.
The world continued to put me to a test.
Junior high seemed to have wanted to reemphasize my unspoken notices. There were evidently those in the community who tirelessly wanted all to integrate.
Once again bussed up north to another school, I was reminded once more, color weren’t referring to beautiful rainbows.
Tone and tint, I affirmed in college, referred to black and white, neither considered true colors due to their own created hues to darken and lighten.
It was in junior high where I was tried at our neighborhood school only to prove that I should have been kept at the one up north.
There was no I told you so. My short-lived transfer to my neighborhood junior high school went to prove they had been right in placing me up north.
Sometimes, it is your pushed upon actions to inadvertently make noise that lead everyone else back to silence. I felt I understood this ahead of those who then, had to agree.
By high school, placing myself in Humanities classes, I learned raising my hand didn’t matter most times. I learned speaking out when I needed to suggest or ask something got the job done quicker.
Funny, when not raising my hand, it seemed I had some aura I was carrying around as if to Please test me to see if I am listening.
Hence, if I wasn’t raising my hand, I was getting called on anyways. Placing myself in Humanities classes served me that best experience of permitting myself to just address the world Socratically- just ask or comment and risk the darn Hemlock poison to your end.
It was in college, being already a mother, where I enjoyed the ability and peaceful freedom to Stop, Look, and Listen what of all was further around me.
Thanks to my husband who was ahead of me in his college years, I had actually arrived to higher learning, a place I envisioned and held faith in to arrive to.
Here is where I embraced the adult world of where the intentions of those around was to not just stop at high school to learn, but go to infinity and beyond of learning some more, each withholding individual intentions to pursue something more of themselves by acquiring more disciplined and structured learning.
I got to wonder further and therefore, ask further. While I could seek expansively on my own, there were dialogue presented before me amongst my colleagues and professors that had they not been around in voice, provocations of deep thinking and reflections of truth would perhaps never have come to be.
I felt my Socratic years in high school got to continue, encouraged further to raise my hand when I couldn’t help but contribute my own thoughts and wonders.
This time in my life, I sensed professors seeing me as their equal- that look. They stopped and they listened.
(They surely all went to kindergarten and learned that skill early.)
What seems to be the piece to thicken character and skin, there, of course, were those few who served to remind me that you’ve got to appreciate the good fruits when seeing those that portray with their actions as if they know they are the rotten ones but try and make you feel as if you are even less than such.
Funny, my silence may have been what caused even greater rottenness of their souls as I knew and seemingly portrayed I was not part and therefore, stood outside of their bushel.
And, so, though in physical absence, I eventually learned all there was to know in kindergarten.
I just inadvertently learned so much more first.
I feel today, I have finally registered my gripping of what it was like to absorb all there would have been to take in that first year missed.
After fighting against so much of what not to allow my heart, mind, body, and spirit to take in, it actually feels really good to understand the world through the eyes of a kindergartener.
Ahem.
Stop. Look. And, listen.
Stop. Look. And, listen.
(In a singing, kindergartener’s voice, mind you.)
