SPINNING OFF . . .
Take this saying: "Bloom where you're planted." Possibly Biblical, though not in those exact words, but the meaning is hanging around several passages of Scripture. This post is not about blooming where one is planted.
When I spun away from blooming where I was planted, I came to what happened after I moved on. (You may remember that my childhood was one of moving and moving on--17 times in my first 20 years.)
Some people, I'm told, re-invent themselves each time they shift to a new place.
- I'm grateful I didn't have awareness enough to do that because by now I wouldn't know myself.
Others take the old self (if you are't offended by that term) wherever they go--in some locales it fits right in; in others, it's the square peg in the round hole; in still others, the old self never actually enters into the life of the new arena.
Being a kid during all those years of uprootedness, I didn't have time to settle into one personality or another, nor to explore possibilities; time passed too quickly for experimentation and assessment.
- First, so long as I had school, I knew who I was, deep down. Being a student was more than a role to play, it was an identity I could wear like a second skin.
- Second, if I paid attention, there was always something I could learn about the place, the people, and (ultimately) about myself in each new location. This was a subtle thing that only became evident in later years. A lot of the learning was by osmosis.
-----
So, what did I learn?
- How to deal with different kinds of people. Not always a happy lesson. In southern Missouri I attended a one-room country school, circa 1951. A "city kid" like me (their assigned tag) couldn't understand what their lives were like. My book-learning was nothing to their life experience as farm kids. Good grades pleased the teacher, but made me few friends.
- Feeling like a very small fish in an outsize pond. In a city the size of Wichita, KS (about 300,000 population in the 1950s), my small town self was again out of place; city bus schedules and routes were a mystery, going to six or more different classes with six different teachers in a single day was unheard of, and a racially integrated student body was like going onto a movie set every day.
- Going back to my hometown when I was entering high school. It wasn't as traumatic as I'd expected. I remembered quite a few of the students from my few years in the local elementary school. Some blooming began.
- Most of all: I learned that I wasn't much different from the kid who left home and lived in various places in the Midwest. I was still an only child, living with my mother and stepfather. I was one of 26 first cousins on my mother's side and one of 11 on my dad's. School was still my favorite place, though the public library ran a close second. And going to classes, learning new things, was where I felt most like myself.
-----
Now for the next step: What does a person do with that new self-knowledge?
I became a perpetual student, until teaching beckoned. Then it became blindingly obvious that all sorts of things can be taught--including choir music, knitting, sewing, letter writing . . . . And another blindingly obvious thought: I could still be a student! Keep on learning! Explore beyond the boundaries of my life!
I've often wondered what my life would have been had I not moved around a lot, met people from backgrounds different from my own, tried on new experiences. That knowledge is beyond me, but I've a motto that has served well over the years: "Nothing is ever lost, ever wasted." One small example: the characters in the stories I write come from years of gathering intel in move after move, state after state.
In a sense, I'm able to become all those people just by living in their stories.What I haven't experienced myself, I make up! That's what fiction is all about.
-----
My question for you--what have you learned when you moved on and bloomed in a new place?
Til next time,
Blessings from
Thursday's Child
No comments:
Post a Comment