One (very small) step at a time

On Easing In

Water one could ease into from the sand. Nickerson State Park, Cape Code, Massachusetts. September 2023.

Coming back to work after a long break is one of my least favorite sensations. I still haven’t gotten used to it. As a freelancer, I was usually coming back to a different job, not the same one, and in office jobs, there weren’t the same kinds of breaks. I don’t know exactly why it’s so hard - maybe the combination of “maybe it will be different?” and “maybe it won’t be different at all?” Like everything else, it’s always better once I actually start doing the thing again then when I think about starting to do the thing again. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about easing in, and actually the whole word “ease.” I’ve heard that word in yoga a lot - look for spaces in your body that hold a sensation of ease, a balance of effort and ease, finding ease within challenge. For someone who is an Achiever in my Clifton Strengths, I find ease to actually be the challenge a lot of the time (while I balked the first time I heard a yoga teacher describe savasana as the hardest pose, it’s so true). I’m skeptical of ease, not sure that anything I do with ease is enough. But as someone who, two years apart and unbeknownst to myself had the word “soften” as my word for the year, I know that ease is a place I want to live, a quality I want to both develop and exude to my immediate surroundings and people.

“Easing in” and “cultivating ease” are different from “being easy.”

I’m so resistant to the idea of ease because I think of it as “taking the easy way out” or “choosing the easy path,” which I’m both personally and culturally conditioned not to do. I’ve been working on understanding ease as “feeling okay in the midst of whatever is happening” or “finding small ways to be okay in the face of chaos” or “take a deep breath and remember that breathing is the first thing that matters before you say anything - literally anything - out loud.” And easing in can be just trying something, starting with a beginner’s mind, not needing a new thing to be perfect at the first attempt, being okay with starting small and scaling up (or not). 

The Queen of Ease. Austin, TX, September 2023.

So I tried to ease in to this semester, both for myself and for my students. Despite needing to do a “hard procedure reset*” I also didn’t want to come down so hard that my students were thrown off balance or not happy to be back at school. 

For my world, easing in looked like:

• Getting fancy tea the morning of back-to-school PD.

• Wearing blanket-adjacent clothing (especially since it was freezing for Texas).

• Meal prepping things I like and that are easy, not trying to do anything too healthy or too new.

• Closing my door in the mornings to get actual work done rather than having it open to distractions first thing.

For my planning, easing in looked like:

• Moving more slowly than I normally would. My mantra for this semester is “things take how long they take;” I’m still working to get rid of my testing mindset from years of teaching ELA. 

• Having students write down things they want to release from last year and burning them.

• Creating vision boards with what they want their 2024 to look like. And only that, nothing else, for a few days.

• Reviewing procedures daily but not starting to enforce them hardcore until the first five-day week (aka this one). 

Vision boards are a key example of “ease” not necessarily being “easy.” While the product of the assignment isn’t particularly complicated, the thinking required to consider the question “What do I want my year to look like?” is really, really big. They loved that they got to choose colors be creative, but some of them were deeply stuck with the question: who do I want to be this year? Of course, there were some of them who slapped pictures together and were done in five minutes, and there were some who got it immediately and wrote novels in addition to their beautifully crafted collages, but it’s the ones in the middle who were particularly interesting through a lens of ease: they were working to find comfort and steadiness in the face of a very BIG prompt. 

In some ways, the universe helped me with cultivating as much ease for all of us by giving us two late-start days the second week back to school, meaning I got two additional luxurious mornings, with extra time at home AND extra time to get work done. I also didn’t push on those days - attendance was light, it was miserably cold outside, and so we shared our vision boards and that was mostly it. 

And you know what…the things got done and I felt better.

Of course, the moment that I started on my regular curriculum after those late-start days, the kids were resistant to the shift and I felt my whole body fall back into last semester’s overwhelm. But because of the easing in, I had at least a little presence of mind to realize that that was what was happening and not buy into the full story that the overwhelm was the only truth of what was going on.

In an ideal world, I’d like to slow everything down to a pace of ease; since I live in reality, I’m looking for ways to infuse elements of the ease we found in the first two weeks into a slightly faster-paced way of working.

My challenge starting this week is to see if there’s a way that I can teach what I need to teach at something like the pace I need to take it AND maintain that sense of ease, that sense that things can take how long they take, and that I (and the kids) can can feel okay even in the midst of some level of chaos. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts on ease (cultivating it, maintaining it, thinking about it), and how you infuse ease into even the least ease-ful situations.

* For the record, I believe in what Learning for Justice, formerly Teaching Tolerance, does. I don’t agree with Teach for America’s practices. This article, originally published by TFA, captures what I mean by procedure reset, so I used it, but have mixed feelings about its source and want to name those.

Input/Output

My holiday music habit co-opted my Spotify Discover Weekly, so I’ve spent the last three weeks trying to figure out exactly how to rebuild the algorithm. This week, I was largely successful, except for three (really?) versions of Auld Lang Syne.

I’ve really liked these two albums to start of 2024.
Midnight Sun by The Gothard Sisters
Waves of Home by the Derina Harvey Band

Balance

We are entering testing season and I am finishing some training and extracurricular commitments in February and March. Because of that, I’ll be sticking to weekend-only classes for a little while. I’d love to help you start your Sundays with a little bit of extra ease!