Wishing Me A Happy Life
First of all, Happy Birthday to our creator. No, I don’t mean with a Capital “C”. I refer to our wonderful editor, muse, inspiration, prompt creator, and so much more. I mean happy birthday Diana. If it had not been for you, Know Thyself, Heal Thyself would not exist and we would not have this free place to learn, inspire, heal, grow, and meet such wonderful new people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart Diana.
When I was nearing retirement age, my department, my friends and my colleagues asked to throw me a celebration of my thirty-three years of teaching. I hesitated at first. A dear friend pointed out that celebrations like this were much more than the person retiring. They were a celebration that people could make it to retirement in such a stressful and difficult profession.
Statistically, the average length of a teacher’s career is about five years. For someone to make it to full retirement is rare. One of the reasons for this is lack of celebrating accomplishments of teachers. If there is a problem, they are held accountable. It is assumed that they will do whatever is required, often without compensation, to do the job. Students we celebrate. We now often have graduation from kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, and finally high school. There are awards aplenty for student success and recognition, but not so much for teachers.
When I took over as the department chair for the mathematics department I sat down with the entire department and set a goal to be the best school in our area testing wise in mathematics. I set a goal of a ninety percent pass rate. We restructured how we taught, how we tutored, how we did teaching. At the end of the year we reached over ninety percent for every teacher on ever test over tests in three different subjects.
No other school came close. I asked permission from the administration and bought every teacher in the department a bottle of champagne. I bought every administrator who supported us in our endeavor a bottle of champagne. We threw parties for each class that had a one hundred percent pass rate. This was a group effort. At the end of the celebration party at school, I told the department I knew they could do it. For each of my seven years as department chair, before I retired, we met that goal.
Now celebrating life: The first time I remember doing a celebration run was in my middle thirties. In the previous year I had been diagnosed with clinical depression, had set a goal to lose a tremendous amount of weight. I took up an exercise routine that started with walking, switched to bike riding, and finally to running. The first day I ran about five kilometers. I ran that far or further every day for over three years, rain, snow, hot and humid, in the dark or whatever was needed.
My first celebration run was about six weeks into my running when I was visiting my family for a holiday weekend. That didn’t have anything to do with why I did it. I didn’t even know leaving the house that I was going to do it. I just started running and decided I was going to run for an hour. I usually ran for twenty-five to thirty minutes each day. Nearing the end of my hour my brother drove up in his car looking for me. My entire family thought I was lost or dead. So much for spontaneous celebrations of life…
Since then, periodically, I do the same. It is never planned, it is not running anymore. I have done celebrations walks, swims, and various other ways of exercising. At times it involves going farther or longer than usual. Other times it is just more actively focusing on whatever it is that I am doing.
