22 February 2012
Thoreau writes, “That day dawns only to which we are awake.”
I think he referred to a spiritual awakening because lately I have been arising
well before the dawn but I don’t feel very much awake. It is as I have said quiet and peaceful out
here in these early, early morning hours, and I do like to see as the day dawns
the color of the air change slowly and perceptively, and then, suddenly, as if a
switch had been turned on, it is day. But I have been up for hours, and out
there it is still dark, and I feel ready for a mid-morning nap.
I have always risen early. At the
beginning, there was school, and school always begins before the business work
day. As a teacher I was required to arrive ahead of the students, and public
transportation runs on schedules. The 6:41am from Penn Station was my steady
ride, and so I awoke at 5:30am to account for my morning ablutions and the
anticipation of subway delays.
And then it was my own children who
had to early arise and be ready to meet school buses, and I arose early to
ensure their preparations. And now that they no longer require my aid, I cannot
sleep through the hours when I am used to be awake and active. And now I am
just tired. And when I am tired, I
wonder . . .
I’ve been thinking about need. Too
much of what I am about to say seems to me now cliché, but I want to express
the ideas anyway that I might see them. I think we all have needs, and one of
my strongest need is to feel needed. Feeling needed gives me a sense of
presence, and announces to myself that I serve a purpose beyond being a mere place-setting,
that I am not alone, and that in my absence there would exist not a space but a
hole. And to need, too, demands presence, and in the expression of need I declare
“I exist, please attend honestly to me,” and I come to exist and offer
existence to the other. Of course, too much need moves beyond presence and becomes
burden, and perhaps relationship entails finding the balance between expressing
and offering need.
Ethics
is in part the practice of need.
1 Comments:
So, too, is meshikhah - in the classroom, in the blog...
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