The beginning of the semester is harder than usual this semester, and I feel like it's taking longer to get traction in my classes, but I keep going. Classes are *starting* to come together.
We now have things to talk about before lecture -- current events, Grey's Anatomy, whether Jenna will be late to class today (she won't, but she will cut it close), things like that.
Last week a student announced that she was going to see 50 Shade Darker. Across the room another student shouted out asking if I was going to see the movie too. Nope, no way I said. I can't identify with a sexy poor girl who gets in a crazy thing with a rich guy. That's not love, that's not romance, that's power plays. I get a few amens.
I continue, connecting the movie to our recent lectures on birth control, marriage, family, and how they live in a new world of choices and opportunities. I do NOT give any of them permission to get married until they can support themselves, and I don't give them permission to marry anyone who can't support themselves because then it isn't a marriage, it's an adoption. Heads nod in agreement.
I check my watch again, it's time to start lecture, so I do.
Later that day I saw a story about how the Dalai Lama meditates 5 hours a day.
I took it as a challenge and started spending afternoons and evenings curled up, falling into a hole of meditation, my mind flying free into my boundless imagination like a balloon untethered.
I meditate with Mad Men in the background.
I meditate while running.
I come back from meditation with concrete questions, with missions, with stories that I don't write until I figure out how they end. At one point I stop and go on a google quest that takes me here and there and all over the internet and now I can tell you 100% for sure that guide/service dogs are not allowed on any roller coaster at any Disney theme park.
I didn't set out to learn that, but part of meditation is just accepting, so here I am, reliably boundlessly untethered.
