Who are YOUR teachers?

Anyone and everything can be your teacher

Aloha, welcome back to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. Howʻs your July going? Mine has been a whirlwind, no easy relaxed vacation mode for me. Whether you are enjoying long, leisurely days or training hard for an actual or metaphorical triathlon, I hope today you will indulge me in a few moments of shared reflection.

Sometimes when asked to describe what I write about in this Substack, I answer that I write about about my teachers. The first year or so I wrote about the spiritual and personal teachers I met during 1992-1997, a period of transition and transformation in my life. The second year, I wrote mainly about horses as teachers. Last week I dipped way back into the past and wrote about my third grade teacher.

Which is also a way of saying, without making it about me, that this Substack is trying to impart lessons (if not wisdom), learned over almost seven decades in some form of this skinny human form.

It occurred to me that I might exhaust this topic. Soon.

Until I started making a list of all domains in which I am currently/still/newly a learner. Because I am still happily a learner in new areas, as well as in all the arenas in which I sometimes mentor or teach what has been passed to me by my mentors. I keep adding to foundations solidified in my brain through inquiry and study. Age brings an entirely new curriculum offered only to advanced students in the proverbial school of hard knocks. And I continue to absorb by immersion and practice in literal hālau¹ of teachings passed down from generation to generation.

I have entered a (linearly measured) time of my life (an “age”) at which I once assumed my sole role would be to pass on what I know to younger people, while diligently engaging in recreational pastimes like bridge and crossword puzzles to keep my brain functioning. My sixties snuck up on me and I forgot what I was supposed to do. Instead I find I have become an unbridled learner full of sometimes passionate, sometimes passing, curiosity. I find that young and very young people are opening my mind to insights and ideas and ways of thinking and being that energize and delight and humble me.

This is not what people mean when they talk about becoming childlike again later in life. But if you are not here yet, let me assure you: it is so cool to be filled again with wonder and possibility!

Photo by Justin Peterson on Unsplash

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Letʻs not make this just about me. I truly believe that the reader for whom I write is also a passionate learner, a person in service to a Why bigger than “she who dies with the most toys wins”. I believe my reader is someone who cares.

So today I get to also ask Questions. Please humor me! Now - or when you can - commit to Pause. Reflect. Write or type or dictate or mumble or chant or chat your Answers. Ready? Paper and pencil, or journal and fountain pen, or app or running route or crashing ocean or rocking chair or fire pit nearby? Here goes.

• In what domains are you learning? Are you a student in your profession, in your personal life? Are you inquiring about fundamental human and social concerns? Are you wanting to master an entire body of knowledge, a particular physical skill, a new pattern of emotional response? All of the above? Times ten?

• Who or what are your teachers, your coaches, your sources of knowledge/information/wisdom/practices? Are you learning from other human beings, non-human sentient beings, human creations, chosen or unexpected experiences, surprising aspects of the natural world?

• In what domains and with whom have you taken on the responsibility of teaching, educating, coaching, mentoring, healing? What do you learn in teaching?

  

  Photo by Thao LEE on Unsplash

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Photo by troy williams on Unsplash

Photo by Product School on Unsplash

Photo by Phillip Goldsberry on Unsplash

[Those photos were intended to be your space to pause for reflection. If you skipped ahead, you get a second chance, just scroll up, take one image and imagine who are the learners, from whom are they learning - are any of those learners similar to you or are their teachers also yours?]

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I have been thinking this week about the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York-based policy think tank where I was a “term” (junior) member in the early 1990s. This train of thought started because Brazilʻs President “Lula” has been in the news. My early readers might remember that besides having a job bringing Brazilian companies to the international capital markets, I became involved with the organization Amanakaʻa and their annual Amazon Week in New York City. The organizationʻs founder was a member of the Workerʻs Party, as was Marina Silva, the Senator who became a close friend and one of my real life superheroes when we met in 1995.² Which is how I came to meet Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then the head of the Workerʻs Party with presidential ambitions. And how I came to convince the Latin American staff specialists at the Council on Foreign Relations that they should take him seriously and schedule him for a conversation with members.

My other most memorable event at the Council was sitting in a room of about 100 members listening to a talk by the Dalai Lama.

When asked his opinion of the Chinese, His Holiness replied, with both humility and sincerity, “They are my greatest teachers.”

As a learner, I continually find myself reminded to count the most difficult people, animals, and situations in my life as among my greatest teachers.

Along with poetry and the young man who takes down trees on my property (and his father and the ghost of his fatherʻs father), along with Duolingo and my vocal coach, along with my avocado tree that did not come down and my friend who argued Bernie to my Hilary and whose political foresight smacked me between the eyes this year, along with my most loving friends and my most stubborn horses, along with ʻolelo noʻeau and the I Ching, along with many writers on Substack and many conversations in local garages and my broken wrist and the practice of writing.

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Might some of you be willing to share your list in the comments? Someone else might find inspiration in your world of learning and teaching instead of in mine.

1. “Schools” or places of learning within a community of traditional practice.

2. Marina currently serves as Minister of the Environment and Climate Change in Lulaʻs cabinet.