My tenth grade health teacher shouted three words at my class all the time: “Everything is connected!”  The phrase was his mantra, his lifeblood.  I thought he was certainly on to something with his claim of universal affiliations.  Unfortunately, much of the time he also seemed to simply be on something.

Mr. Paré, when I knew him, was the type of person who espouses living in the moment (as I did in my last blog entry) and taking a very holistic approach to the world, but who can’t seem to ever practice what he preaches.  He was the most stressed out guy I’ve ever met, and he was a health teacher.  Ironic, no?   Anyway, as a result of his utterly frazzled nature, all of Mr. Paré’s admonitions about not doing drugs and taking deep breaths and noticing all of the connections in the world routinely fell on deaf ears.

Admittedly, there were a bunch of idiots and assholes in my class, so it’s kind of a chicken-or-the-egg issue: did Mr. Paré go crazy because of his students making fun of him, or did they make fun of him because he was crazy?  He wasn’t crazy, though.  Just… burnt out.  At least, he was by the time I had him as a teacher.  My sophomore year was his first back from an “extended vacation” in Arizona - of several years - to recover from, as the rumors went, a nervous breakdown.  I really did often feel very bad for him, since the poor guy just seemed so fundamentally unwell, but then he’d say something extremely condescending to my class, and I’d resent him for it.  Mr. Paré essentially had no respect for people my age, and he would speak in such terms, in those broad generalizations — about “people my age” versus “people your age.”  But this just brings up another conundrum: did Mr. Paré have no respect for his students because they didn’t respect him in the first place, or did they not respect him because he had no respect for them in the first place?  Yeah.  Complicated.  It was clearly a vicious cycle, but when that cycle began, and who began it, I have no idea.

“Everything is connected!” he would shout, and my classmates would laugh derisively.  “Yeah, right,” they’d say.  “Connect a cloud to a pineapple,” one would say, stupidly.  And, stupidly, Mr. Paré would attempt to do so, and obviously fail to do so.  “Connections don’t work like that!” I wanted to tell them all — but, timid as I was at the time, I said nothing.  “Connections don’t work like that — they’re subtle and random and profound and clever and graceful and mysterious and… they’re not clouds and pineapples.”

I mean, they could be, but that’s the thing: Mr. Paré’s point, or at least the one he would always try in vain to get across to the class, was that there are endless possibilities in the world, that there is room for countless iterations, countless relationships, countless partnerships.  That we live in a world in which things inherently overlap and interrelate,  a world without meaning that nevertheless has definition, and definitions.  That life seems to be an organized chaos, organized by virtue of the fact that things work together.  That all of this is true, even if most of the time we fail to notice all of the interactions taking place around us.

The “vicious cycle” I spoke of between Mr. Paré and the more insensitive and rebellious students he had over the years — what better example of connectedness could there be?  Connectedness isn’t, in other words, a necessarily positive thing.  But it is a fact of life.  It’s how it is.

I just looked up “holistic” on dictionary.com, because I frankly wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.  I found my way to the definition of “holism,” which essentially says what I said two paragraphs ago in a more succinct manner:  “whole entities, as fundamental components of reality, have an existence other than as the mere sum of their parts.” I am so down with this idea.  It’s just… right.  And true.  It’s how it is.

Wheaton College officially embraces - and relentlessly advertises its embrace of - the concept of connectedness.  But to a certain extent I’ve found the Connections program here to be akin to Mr. Paré’s bug-eyed exhortations about holism to my tenth-grade health class.  What’s being said is true, but the manner in which it’s being said isn’t so great.

Now, I don’t mean to be against The Man solely for the sake of being against The Man, here.  But the institutionalization of connectedness has made the discovery of the interrelated nature of the world a chore for so many students at Wheaton.  Indeed, instead of discovery, it has become a matter of fulfillment, as in: “have you fulfilled your Connections yet???”  Exploration has given way to fill-in-the-box, to check-off-the-requirements, to rote superficiality.  And that doesn’t sit well with me.

Efforts have, of course, been made to imbue the Connections program with greater flexibility: Student-Initiated Connections are encouraged, for instance.  But such modifications and amendments haven’t changed its fundamental nature, and its fundamental nature, so set in stone, seems to me to go against what the program is trying to accomplish in the first place.

Maybe the good outweighs the bad in this case.  I really don’t know.  I don’t think I’m in a position to make a fully informed judgment one way or the other.  Perhaps making students take a number of classes outside of their major, and making them tease out the links between classes in seemingly disparate disciplines is, on the whole, beneficial.  But I wonder how much more agreeable students would be to investigating linkages if doing so wasn’t a matter of graduating.

I guess what I’m saying, Wheaton (The Man), is: stop shouting “Everything is connected!” at us!  Stop beating us over the head with this stuff.  Stop trying to force it upon us.

It’s true and fair to say that we can’t always make connections by ourselves — after all, that would go against the very idea of connectedness, wouldn’t it? — but that doesn’t mean that our discoveries must abide by a certain timetable and must fall within certain parameters.  People learn things on their own schedule, in their own ways.  They might simply not get it in tenth grade.  Or by junior year of college.  That’s okay — it’s how it is.

Life is me and you and everyone and everything, together as one, a whole greater than the sum of its parts.   Life is also me and you and everyone and everything, distinct, the parts of an unformed-whole.  Were everything just the same, everything couldn’t possibly be connected.  It would instead just be… the same.  Our distinctness, in other words, is what allows us to come together.

Isn’t that just the greatest paradox ever?  I just love it.  It’s how it is, and I love it.

I wanna run through the halls of my high school
I wanna scream at the top of my lungs
I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you’ve got to rise above

- John Mayer

I’ve been thinking lately about that oft-heard and oft-uttered phrase “the real world.” I don’t like it. For one thing, the term has become a cliché. I don’t mind a cliché if I think it expresses a fundamental truth, which many clichés do, and which explains how they’ve become clichés in the first place. Unfortunately, this particular overused term does no such thing. In fact, as I see it, the phrase “the real world” promotes a way of approaching life that is, if not actively harmful, decidedly uninformed. Let me explain.

*

What is the opposite of “real”? “Unreal,” “imaginary,” “fake” – take your pick. So the opposite of “the real world” can, in other words, fairly be called “the fake world.” Imagine if such a term existed. It sounds funny, doesn’t it? Certainly no one would ever use it in conversation, and with good reason. However, the very existence of the phrase “the real world” implies the existence of its opposite phrase, and that’s where we run into problems.

Consider this: young people are constantly being told that they must prepare for “the real world.” Children hear this before they even hit puberty. Through the use of this phrase, children and teens alike are being sent a message: namely, that their current lives, their current existences, are simply not important or legitimate. They are, rather, fake. Life before college graduation is just a lark, an exercise in superficiality and, indeed, meaninglessness.

By constantly foisting the term “the real world” upon youths, adults instill in them, purposefully or not, the belief that their lives, prior to reaching certain milestones, are simply filler for what’s to eventually come, even if that “eventually” is a long way off. Infancy, childhood, and adolescence? Mere placeholders. Life doesn’t begin until you set off on your own and have to make money for yourself, or didn’t you know? Alternately, as a fourth grade teacher may tell her students, it is fifth grade when things really get tough, and may God have mercy on those souls who haven’t worked their butts off in class this year in mastering long division.

The thing is, of course, this is almost exactly what the fifth grade teacher is telling her students about the sixth grade. Best be fully prepared, because pre-junior high is absolutely vicious. Teachers will have no mercy on you. (Funnily enough, however, it turns out that each year, teachers remain capable of showing mercy and even empathy; and at the same time, each year they provide their classes with dark premonitions about the upcoming grade.)

I don’t mean to demonize teachers for often taking this route with their students: it’s understandable, though not excusable, that they do so. Keeping children motivated in the classroom is undoubtedly hard work, and seeing students display a lack of diligence is undoubtedly frustrating. But essentially scaring children into working harder is not the prudent way to deal with issues of deficient motivation, especially when these scare tactics carry with them an implicit devaluation of kids’ lives.

Consider the following quote by that wise old muppet Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. The Jedi Master says, in reference to the young, eager-for-adventure Luke Skywalker: “All his life has he looked away, to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, hmm, what he was doing. Hmmph.”

Yoda said it right. Where, in today’s über-fast, forward-obsessed world, is the focus on the here and now? It is undoubtedly important to plan ahead, and to set up and work toward long-term goals; but to sacrifice the quality of one’s present, or to deny the very validity of one’s present, in the name of one’s eventual, may-or-may-not-come-true future? That’s no good.

*

For most of my sophomore year at Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School, my life sucked. School sucked, and school was the primary feature of my life, along with family. I dreamt of dropping out once I turned sixteen in order to join the Peace Corps. There, I thought, I’d have a chance to actually “make a difference” and really “do something with my life.” School was becoming more and more about tests and grades and their impact on one’s chances of getting into a so-called good college. Sophomore year was, in other words, about future, non-present things. I felt like my life was becoming meaningless, in a tragic way thus affirming the subconscious messages teachers had instilled in me and my peers in prior years whenever they employed the “real world” concept. Your life isn’t real yet; you’re not old enough to be real. This year? It’s just a drill. Tread water; it’s all you can do for the time being, after all.

Before the year was up, though, things changed a bit. I did a lot of thinking about my fifth grade teacher, who had died when I was in eighth grade. He was one of those teachers, the seemingly rare ones who are truly able to “make a difference.” I thought about why it was that Mr. Mitchell was such an impactful and effective educator. I thought about the nature of his life’s work – a life which, incidentally, ended abruptly at the age of fifty-six due to a heart attack. What was it, exactly, that Mr. Mitchell did with his life? And how?

It took me a while, but eventually I figured out what it all came down to: Mr. Mitchell didn’t wait for the future to arrive. He understood that we live in the present. We can’t help but live in the present. The future never arrives; the present merely shifts in time, and all of us along with it.
Mr. Mitchell had esophageal cancer in his thirties, and after he survived that, he viewed each day as a blessing. He had one abiding piece of advice for his colleagues: “When you get home, hug your children, and tell them that you love them.”

And so I realized: I don’t need to join the Peace Corps to “make a difference” in the world – after all, B-R High School is as much a part of the world as anywhere else on the globe! I don’t need to wait around for opportunities to “do something with my life,” regardless of what adults might tell me. I could die tomorrow – unlikely, perhaps, but true. I can’t take the here and now for granted. I have to do what I can to better the world around me, and if that means work to improve B-R for the next two years, so be it. I can do that. I should do that. I’ll start today.

*

In his 2007 book The Power of Play, child psychologist David Elkind states that children should be perceived not as human beings, but as human becomings. In truth, however, we are all, irrespective of our age and the environment we find ourselves in – whether it’s a school, workplace, or home – both beings and becomings. We are all simultaneously finished products and works in progress.

That is to say – striving for a better tomorrow is good. Goals are good. But we’ve got to remember that the only time we have to make a difference is now, whether we’re fifteen or we’re fifty. Everyone, regardless of age, has the capacity to enact positive change. It’s not a matter of scale – the issue isn’t how much progress is made, only that it is made – but, rather, of timing. Start living, being, becoming, and making a difference today, since today is all we’ve ever got to work with in this world. For real.

Tuesday, September 15, 8:04 pm –

So here I am in the café preparing to listen to the SGA speeches. I don’t quite know why I’m here.  I mean, that sounds cynical, but whatever.  I guess I’m here to see how many platitudes I can count.

Really, though.  I’ve seen a lot of the Facebook groups of people running for various offices.  Many candidates seem to think they will single-handedly (re-)engage the student body in the affairs of student government.  And, well, maybe they can.  Maybe all the people running will actually be dedicated to the job, and will do as much as possible to reach out to their constituents.  My senator last year didn’t send a single e-mail to the dorm he represented, which is just unacceptable. continue reading »

Well, hello there!  First I’d like to thank incoming SGA Vice President Riley Waggaman for graciously giving me the opportunity to keep a blog on the SGA website this year (read: Riley begged me for weeks to do him a favor).  As this is my senior year at Wheaton, I think it’s a great time to do some blogging.  I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it (at the very least, it should be a great procrastination tool). continue reading »

SGA is proud to present the release of the first SGA blog: Joshua Begley’s Sober Thoughts. Hooray! We look forward to reading it!