How could anyone who loved school as much as I did hate the idea that life itself is a school? And how can someone who was a Safety, for goodness’ sake, be such a bad student? Shouldn’t I be thriving on learning new things in a giant earth classroom with you, my teachers, and classmates?
I’ve moved up to the front row because I can’t see over John Houser, and I would be sitting next to Chris, if the seating chart was alphabetized, but he died. So did Sally. Which boggles my mind and breaks my heart. But then, we’re all going to die, and as Richard Dawkins says, that makes us the lucky ones because most people are never going to be born. The number of possible people allowed by our DNA outnumbers the stars in the universe. So, we are the privileged few who overcame stupefying odds for the privilege of being here to learn and to grow together, and lately, I’ve been confronting a new challenge.
One of my friends from adolescence and I have nearly the same birthday. He’s a doctor in Vermont now, but we made a pact a while back to connect every year on that date, and because he’s a doctor, he always asks about my health. I like this. A lot. It’s different than when your regular friends ask you how you’re doing. When my friend asks me, he listens intently with his head cocked to the side, like he’s meditatively gripping either end of a stethoscope around his neck, and then he offers thoughtful suggestions. Expert medical advice from the boy who went to camp Wanga-Wanga every summer, perennially assigned to the Sioux cabin with Wet-Wet Myers. (A popular class in Life School is “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.”)
We had a great catch-up this morning because even though this is my writing day, I wanted to make room for this ritual. “Work-Life Balance” is one of the classes I’m repeating in Earth School having failed it for many years. Okay, forever.
There are fewer and fewer of us in this class, and I’m starting to panic. Everyone else has graduated to “Having Fun in the Here and Now!” They are across the hall laughing, planning yet another field trip while I’m still scrubbing the blackboards in “There’s Work to Do,” which is the super-fun prerequisite to “So You’ll Never Retire.” To get into this class, it helps to have been raised by parents with a strict, probably Scottish, work ethic that prescribes work every minute, save every penny, and wear pretty underwear in case a bus runs over you.
Fun is for superficial people with no depth who don’t clean their dinner plates even though clearly that practice feeds starving children in Africa.
This upbringing is difficult to unlearn. It promotes “doing” as opposed to “being,” which I honestly consider a huge waste of time. I’ve equated productivity with happiness and work with worth, unfortunately. And please don’t tell me to breathe. We all breathe. I don’t want to breathe your slow way or stop to smell the roses. If I do smell the roses, I’m probably going to write about them.
You see the problem here.
So, of all life’s teachers no one wants to get stuck with Jealousy– a tough-love instructor I know well. She teaches “The Grass is Always Greener.” This is a trick class, but I fall for it every time! I know that my envy of friends who now are in recess until they die—which could easily be another 30 years—(30 years of recess!!) serves no one. And I’m not sure it’s even genuine because I love what I do and who I do it with (that would be you).
But it’s just hard to be sitting here at my desk as the sun shines outside my window, and I don’t have time to take the dog for a walk. Then, when I do take her for a walk, I see your plane to Portugal passing overhead, and I’m not kidding; I feel left out and left behind.
So, is it possible to long for something you don’t actually want? To envy others’ lives because you imagine a satisfaction greater than your own, that may or may not be real, but the pain is real?
Is FOMO a class I can pass? If I stop passing notes, distracting my neighbors, and talking while the teacher is talking?
I live in a state of constant revision, because the plot keeps changing when it comes to my own desires and because I really do want to learn to be a better person. As Maria Popova says, we don’t fully know what we want because we are half-opaque to ourselves.
Yet we are the lucky few who got to attend this school—to grow together—to study at each other’s houses, and to ask for help. I need yours.
How often is it true that something we didn’t want ends up enlarging our lives in an unimaginable way?
Be my undoing.
Teach me to play.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
