ANEW: Move About the Country

Do what you were called to do!

Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

Lately, in addition to my RV travels, my life has been mainly about breathing in the humanity abounding around the country, mostly in airports. 

As I write this blog post, I spy ‘with my little eye’ a mother and her two children about to board a plane to Midland/Odessa, Texas, and then onto Dallas in the Denver Airport. (Sometimes you can but overhear people’s conversations when everyone is this][close.) The oldest of the two boys is around six years old and not more than six feet away from me. He impressively vacuums up a sugar cookie down his gullet in record time. The cookie is a reward for not pulling out a video game system from his wee travel bag because “we have to go as soon as our flight is called!” Yet, in the time it took him to polish off the cookie, the cookie eater and his mom both caved, and the kid-sized tablet computer was out, and he was playing away.  (Two once famous sayings are embedded into one phrase: “The best-laid plans of mice and men – presumably of six-year-olds and their mothers – often go awry.” And, “If you give a mouse a cookie….” (I’m unsure how this phrase concludes, but you might know.) 

Trying to delay immediate gratification and keep herself grounded on what she can control, Mom and the little brother play superhero make-believe. I was even mesmerized as the mom and younger son acted out multiple characters, changed voices, walked the plank (superhero pirates?), and provided the “create” in creative play.

Also, around the airport, quite a few families and friends cruise in from various destinations and locales to meet at the Denver Airport to continue their journeys together. Perhaps this has always been a thing – airport destination meet-ups – but people seem stoked and enlivened as they prepare for their adventures ahead. On my travels over the years, these rendezvous seem to happen more often than one might imagine. Airports as our national and international town centers or village greens where passing the time with a purpose takes on newer import.

On the other hand, Airports are also similar to other American forms of watching, waiting, travel, and entertainment. They are also like casinos because people are literally transported elsewhere, but unlike casinos, they never lose track of time in an airport. You literally can’t. Clocks abound. The travel people definitely want you to know what time it is as your flight gets delayed, as mine back to Boston did, so that you don’t miss the delayed flight or flights, while having your name called throughout the terminal for missing a flight that your luggage made – as some poor soul who was being paged for over twenty minutes while I waited for my flight to finally board. 

And airports are also different than casinos because you have the landscape around the airports’ mechanistic underbelly, namely jetways, baggage handling apparatus, etc., where you get to see people at work, a kind of OZ scenario from inside the belly of the beast as it mostly is, where folks behind the scenes hustle to make the rest of us on time to wherever we are headed. Real people run and work at airports and airlines, staff shops and restaurants inside their industrial walls. The day I traveled was a beautiful Mile High kind of Day, or at least that’s what it looked like as I “spied” the baggage handlers in short sleeves outside. Like casinos, the rest of us are tucked away inside comfortably comfortable in our preoccupied bubbles of “different-sameness.”

Like the folks headed to Odessa/Midland, we await instructions from people who know better. They may not know exactly why a flight has been delayed, but they know that their job is to be like that mom with her two boys under the age of six—the path of least resistance will be the path most taken. 

I write about airports in this latest post because I am thinking about what the Daoists call “‘wu wei’ (simplified Chinese: 无为; traditional Chinese: 無為; pinyin: wúwéi), which is an ancient Chinese concept literally meaning "inexertion," "inaction," or "effortless action" (from Wikipedia). By the way, the Midland/Odessa flight boarded soon after the three settled a bit while Mama Bear hustled her cubs onto the plane. Double the distance away from me than the six year old was – to my left – a man listens, without headphones I might add, to what sounds like “Casablanca.” Man, what we choose to do with the “extra time” we have been given! 

As I peek closer, I see that it is “Casablanca.” I make no judgments. I may have seen “Casablanca” or “Raging Bull” or aimlessly scrolled on Facebook more than a time or two to kill time. Moments that certainly are now gone forever.

Starting ANEW is about waiting when your flight is delayed. What do you do? What should you do? Surf on your phone? Return emails? Catch up with a friend or family member who may be busy or asleep? My wu wei time is being used to deeply survey the landscape, start this blog, and see what kind of “work” calls to me next. 

I think about the waiting work I will be doing / am doing, which may comprise many a thing or two down the road. Things I may even come to love. At the moment, I am waiting to mostly help schools and colleges thrive, or stay afloat during these next few years, or even close elegantly. Perhaps I will help a long-time independent school couple relocate to the Northeast because they always wanted to “try out” boarding schools – and they have a kid who plays hockey! That’s it. Or, that is some of “it.” I’ve become a kind of school family general practitioner // ER doctor. 

To that end, I’ve started my consulting practice, 3 Robins Group, with a website coming soon. I’m also beginning to help with the search practice for School First with my friends and colleagues, Wendy Wilkinson and Linda Talton. In addition, I’ll help NEASC (New England Association of Schools and Colleges) look closely at some of the practices of their member schools in the region and around the world. I may even get to help the community colleges in my old hometown make their first foray into fundraising because they are doing some very good work with communities far from resources, AND they have an amazing story to tell. 

Again, Wu Wei is perfect for effortless action/inaction. Will I jump back into a school, college, or nonprofit? Sure, probably. But right now, I am enjoying the ability to “move about the country” with the open-mindedness that comes with it. Thirty-four years of being in schools is what Proctor Academy’s longest serving Head of School David Fowler called being “institutionalized, which can make Jennie, Joanie, Johnny, or Brian a dull girl or boy. 

Do what you were called to do. Impact can’t be manufactured like a political candidate's talking points or faux outrage. Memento Mori. Seize every moment or every day as if it were your last. Or, don’t.

May it always be so.

Curated Listening:

Take a gander at this evocative poem about waiting and wondering. View the film of Robin Coste Lewis’s poem, “Every Day,” HERE.