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"Breeze from the Lake", oil, by Karen Winters |
Every so often, one of my students suddenly “gets it”: an understanding somehow arrives inside them so they “see” what I’ve been trying to teach. The analogy most often used to describe this experience is the light bulb, as though someone inside a student’s head turned a switch and understanding was suddenly shining there. One moment the student is in a sort of darkness, fumbling among my words to find the way, and the next moment the lamp of his mind makes a light that says, “I get it!” Jesus used a different analogy. When a breeze blew by, he asked his friends if they knew where it came from. They were naturally puzzled because, of course, it’s impossible to tell just where any breeze began. Jesus went on to explain that thoughts are similar: they suddenly spring up in our lives, but there’s no telling where they began. Like the breeze, they’re just suddenly and mysteriously there. Today, I want to be aware of this wonderful phenomenon in my classroom. All day there will be breezes of thoughts passing through the lives of my students and me, and all we have to do is loosen up and take pleasure in them. They don’t “start” in our brains, just as a wind that unsettles the leaves of a tree doesn’t arise in that tree. The wind is one small signal from the immeasurable atmospheric forces surrounding the earth, and our thoughts are part of the similarly immeasurable mental force that’s been smoothly whooshing through and lighting up the universe for all eternity, and which will be refreshing Room 2 at Pine Point School today from 8:30 am to 3:00 pm.
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