As free as you'll ever be

When you make decisions, many of them are influenced by who you are with, or even those in the same environment.  One of the understated difficulties of teaching is that it requires an awareness of the mindset of every person in the room.  A good teacher has a relative awareness of who is engaged or not, and why or why not. For P.E., that's 50 students. 

This is exhausting.

I never realized how abnormally autonomous and independent I was until I joined a fraternity.  All of a sudden I had to sit though inefficient meetings and accept group decisions that I disagreed with.  My decisions now had to account for a larger group of people than ever before, many of which I had never consciously chosen to be a part of my life.

I'm somewhat in tune with how the people around me feel, and I try to act accordingly.  It's not always inconvenient to adjust my decisions to suit other people or a group, but I'm aware of when it happens.  It's a normal part of life.

Spending three weeks alone in Brazil last summer was the most exhilarating freedom I've ever experienced.  

All that weight, all that awareness, gone.  There were times when it was more intoxicating than others, and there were times when I got lonely, but it was incredible.

Can you imagine a day where you are unaccountable to anyone for anything?

My every decision was mine alone.  Every choice was mine to weigh, to evaluate, to process.  Sometimes I made bad decisions, but even then I learned from it and owned it entirely.

I had a daily routine, regardless of the city or hostel.  Upon leaving wifi, I would start "Stay High" on Spotify up in my headphones, and feel my heartbeat speed up as I silently and ecstatically merged with the flow of the city, on my way to adventure.  It never got old.

I felt like I had trained my entire life for that experience.  Traveling, decision-making.  Analyzing the data available and making the best choice in that moment.  Calling audibles, disregarding norms, calmly and efficiently.  

It felt so pure, so clean.  Thrilling.

Looking back, I don't know anyone that would have kept up with me on that trip.  Maybe Vincent or Mark or Brian.  I was sleeping irregularly, eating irregular things irregularly.  There was a stretch where I didn't sleep in a prone position for three nights (two busses and a small couch).  There was a morning where I bought a package of unlabeled meat for my entire day's sustenance, unsure of when I would eat again.  I got to push all the limits I would be hesitant to suggest to anyone else.

Obviously this says a lot about me.  The thing is, I honestly didn't know how I would respond to traveling by myself, beforehand.  I've always traveled to see people I love, or see things with people I love.  Creating shared memories.  But that's the thing with traveling; you discover yourself.  I'm not going to go out of my way to be alone on future adventures, but I won't shy away from it either.

Gratitude

I have a theory on gratitude.  You shouldn't be surprised.  The theory is that gratitude breaks Newton's third law..  Not every act that deserves gratitude receives it's just due. It can't, and often it shouldn't.  This presents a problem (gift pun alert.. moving on).  The problem is that the argument for human cooperation is often simplified down to something like "if you want to get presents from your friends on your birthday, then you need to get them presents for their birthdays".  Everything becomes a trade, where we expect to see the physical payoff of any and all effort.

Fact is, many gifts cannot be fully appreciated/reciprocated.  Great gifts require research and time and thought and sacrifice and things that can never be completely represented in the actual item.  There is something lost in the transaction.  Let's say the receiver of the gift grasps the full extent of the love put into the gift: how can they express their gratitude? It's impossible in that moment to show  understanding and appreciation.  Of course, it can be shown later, by returning the favor, but not all gifts provide that opportunity.  

This means that love is lost, or it appears so, if you're counting.  If you put a number on your sacrifice, and numbered the return you witnessed, it would not add up.  Humans dislike this, as a rule.  We like thinking that things balance, or even return a profit to us.  

I'm using gifts at Christmas as the analogy, but my theory is quite broader.  Let's take your parents.  Say you're an odd child, and you are aware of the sacrifices your parents make for you.  You can express your gratitude, but does the mere expression balance the equation?  The sacrifice, the "gift", is a one-way street, at least on the surface.  

Teaching.  If you go into teaching thinking that your effort and sacrifices will be matched by each of your students (the sum of your students?), you are not going to be teaching for long.  It simply does not work that way.  Teachers, like parents, have to latch onto any speck of gratitude they can detect, and cherish it until the next blue moon (and I'm saying this as a teacher who has had more appreciative students than most).  I'm by no means complaining.

This partially comes back to the seen and the unseen (and what doesn't?).  Despite my status as a cold-hearted economist, I'm not going to break down how parents care for their children because they've calculated the long run benefit to themselves, and, in my experience, teachers aren't just trying to make the world better in a vague sense, but trying to impact individual lives.  They sacrifice out of love.

I don't think I'm breaking new ground here; Christmas is a Christian holiday, and the idea is pretty fundamental to Christianity.  A sacrifice that can never be repaid.

  

The ground I am breaking is this: give love without expecting it to be returned in equal measure to you.  Do not attempt to compare what you give with what you get.  Once you start calculating and tabulating, you will become dissatisfied, because your powers of observation are too feeble to understand the true effect, and honestly, even the true effect doesn't always benefit you, the initial actor, equally.  The effect could be spread to other people at other places and times.

It's also a warning.  Don't expect the gratitude received to match the effort, and more urgently, do not depend on it, do not do anything solely for the thanks you expect to receive.  You have to keep your focus at all times.  If you find yourself justifying a sacrificial act with a tangible short-term payoff, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.  Imagine someone who works for a company for twenty years, stays on weekends, etc.  You have to know WHY you are doing that, and you have to know the company/people in it are incapable of thanking you for your service — their gratitude cannot be why you're working.  At best they will pause their day when you retire and share a cake.  It would be unfair to resent them for that; your expectations were unrealistic.

If we stopped our lives to fully appreciate every thoughtful and generous act, the person being thanked would have to thank those thanking, and thankers thanked for thanking thankees; it would soon lose all meaning.  The very idea of human progress is dependent on people doing good things for others and not getting the recognition they "deserve".

It's true that if you look at the world, you will see many people who seem to give all the time, and you will see many people who only take.  I think most people are in the middle, though.  The ones who expect a balance.  You should consider which you are.  Givers, don't give up.  Balancer? Think more broadly.  Taker?  Merry Christmas, you filthy animal