What is Essential?

What is essential?  This is the question we must ask of all who are involved in education.  Now is a critical time.  I am concerned that we are on the brink of losing a generation of students to testing and political agendas.  It is long past time when we need to return management, decision-making, and leadership back to teachers and educators.

What is essential?  I believe the answers will impact our future.

Vulnerability

The research of Dr. Brene Brown points to Vulnerability and Authenticity as our greatest strength.  Our honest flaws and our fearful secrets are often the sweetest, richest parts of our life.  We are not perfect.  It is where we have been broken and healed that our transformation resides.

I am aware that, at this point in my life, some relationships and dreams that have crumbled have given rise to my next dream and greatest gifts.  Every time someone has been disappointed because I was not what they wanted me to be, I have become more of what I needed to be.  Each time I have allowed my honest vulnerability, I have become more authentic. 

I hope to remember with my next fall, I am getting ready to stand up again into a new and better self.

An Affirmation of Humanity

Miriam Elkes, a survivor of the Holocaust, often told her son that throughout her ordeal, she always carried two things on her person.  One was a piece of bread, the other was a piece of comb.  She kept the bread in case someone needed it more than her.  Each night she would comb her hair to affirm that she was still a human being.

What do you and I have within us or on us that can help others in their time of need?  What do we do on a daily basis to affirm our humanity?  No matter how challenged we are, there is always something we can give to another in the world.  The greater our challenge, the more essential it is to do something each day that affirms our humanity.

Challah Bread

Just Be Yourself

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be yourself; everyone else is occupied.