Difficulty

Rereading that last post I sound awfully discontented, so I think I should add a word or so more to this. I'm not at all unhappy in my life or really dissatisfied with the things I have been able to do in my education, spare time, and professional life. Moving to New York, grad school, the job I have been in for several years, losing 30 lbs and keeping it off, learning another language, teaching English are all activities that do in fact have loads of meaning for me and I don't underestimate the importance of them. So it's not that I have really been blocked or had difficulty finding meaningful things to do and I don't take the capacity to do any of this for granted. I think what is bothering me, and has been bothering me since the election is a larger question about how to organize my life. There are all sorts of universal difficulties, sometimes caused by nature and chance, but more often caused by human error, greed, indifference, and apathy. We all are guilty of various incarnations of this from time to time, although some obviously more than others. We all learn our roles, our place, and our way of fitting in and making it in this world. Those lessons teach us ways of shielding ourselves from all the potential ill that could come to pass (financial ruin, loneliness, illness, being the victim of a crime.) We develop ways of being to protect ourselves, but those habits insulate us from strangers and from the unknown. These habits are ground into us from the day we are first spoken to (along the lines of don't talk to that strange man, don't go to those parts of town.) Changing the way we interact with one another ranges from challenging to impossible. From the little bit I know about her life, Marla Ruzicka was so clearly an example of someone who was able to transcend some of these day to day rules and regulations that we all live by to a certain extent.

Last fall, my friend who teaches seventh grade knew I wanted to do some volunteer work in the neighborhood, so he set me up with one of his students, a teenage girl whose had loads of trouble with her family and with schoolwork. She didn't do work in school, was stubborn and intransigent with teachers and with her foster mom, but when we got settled in at my apartment, she would try any excercise I asked her to. At the beginning, it was super-awkward, and often making conversation with her was next to impossible. I was conscious of the fact that didn't know much about what the kids are listening to and on the walk to my apartment I sometimes gave up on thinking of things to talk to her about. The first few times I was supposed to pick her up I desperately wished I has dinner plans with friends or could go home and watch TV, but it did get more comfortable over time. She was probably about three years behind in her reading level, so reading books was a little torturous, but we were plugging away, and I kind of got into finding little excercises that might be good for her. In the end though after a few months, she quit showing up for tutoring, and after she stood me up a couple times, I told her mom to please call me in the future, but for now it didn't seem to be working out. I took from all this 1) that it is that it's hard to get yourself out of your comfort zone, to do something different with someone who isn't necessarily going to be comfortable around you, 2) perhaps I'm not necessarily well-equipped to help someone with a different life history and experience, 3) even though I probably live an eighth of a mile from this child, in a certain sense we don't share a community or neighborhood, we function in entirely separate worlds, and finally 4) poverty and abuse and crappy schools make it hard for kids to learn and shut people off to new experiences.

And then I read about someone like Marla Ruzicka and I feel a little helpless, I guess.