Icarus and Jesus

In the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus, Icarus is given wings made of feathers held together by wax. His father warns him: don’t fly too high or the sun will melt the wax in your wings, and don’t fly too low or the ocean will soak the feathers. Icarus forgot this warning, he flew too high, and his wings melted. Icarus fell into the sea and drowned.

The only thing I really remember about this story from when I first heard it is the warning, “Don’t fly too high.” It’s a warning against hubris, excessive pride, arrogance, or over-confidence (perhaps even forgetfulness). It’s Icarus’ over-confidence that got him killed.

In writer Seth Godin’s book, The Icarus Deception, Seth also points out the other part of the warning: don’t fly too low. As Seth says in this blog post, “The Icarus Deception argues that we're playing it too safe, hence my need to go outside my (and your) comfort zone.”

That point has fortified me with a certain amount of confidence to start stepping into uncharted territory in my work as a teacher and in my dreaming about what's possible in education. What restraints can I loosen to impact students and teachers more succinctly, more broadly, more creatively, and more wholly? And where I’ve most stepped into this idea that yes, I can fly higher and still be safe, is in my self-expression and willingness to align myself more and more clearly with my commitment to the well-being of all life.

But there’s still a sun up there, and I’m still wearing wax wings. In any exploration, we’re not alone, and not using our communities for support and guidance, and then even acting in contradiction to repeated messages or others' expertise, is hubris that gets us too close to the sun.

Icarus probably had a few moments of warning where the wings didn’t work exactly right. He should’ve listened and dialed it back, dropped in altitude. And when it became too late, when the wings became dysfunctional, I’m sure he had a long moment of terror as the truth hit him: his arrogance and self-righteousness had done him in.

There's terror in falling from that height. It's sometimes tough to know what the actual impact will be at the bottom of the fall, or even when the final impact has actually occurred.

Icarus drowned in the sea that eventually bore his name, but most of the time we don’t actually die after we’ve fallen. It may feel like we are dying, we may at times in some way see death as possible relief, but the fall doesn’t usually kill us.

At the end of this Easter weekend, however, the story that gets my fingers moving along the keyboard is the story of redemption. In the northern hemisphere of our magical planet, we’re stepping into the rebirth of life in this brightening, colorful, and warming season of spring.

For those of us with a Christian background, Easter as a religious holiday is also the promise of rebirth. Growing up, I thought that Easter was only meaningful for our death, that Jesus was promising an afterlife of glory to make up for this challenging and sinful life. However, the religious holiday of Easter now seems so much more than that. It's the promise of redemption and rebirth, here and now in this life, from whatever falls our arrogance, mistakes, or iniquities lead us to experience.

No matter the harshness of winter around here, Spring arrives. When our own inner Icarus flies too high, let's not forget the renewal promised by our own inner Jesus. Then it's time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again.

Thanks so much for spending time with me. ❤️

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Encouraging Conditions

It started a few winters ago. My hands begin to get dry and chapped around the middle of December. I’ll get small cuts next to my finger nails or along the backs of my hands, and those little cuts can hurt! I know that the cuts will heal themselves eventually, but by putting on some antibiotic healing cream, they seem to heal more quickly and, at least, less painfully.

The body has a remarkable self-healing capacity; it can heal, on its own, so many of the injuries we get. Not all of them, but many of them. The trick is to give the body the best possible conditions to heal itself. With the right conditions of cleanliness, circulation, pressure, air exposure, etc., the body is encouraged to do its dynamic and magical self-healing.

We see this self-healing with plants too. Old trees show their scars of healing up their trunks, house plants can bounce back from near death, and demolished ecosystems will regrow themselves. Give plants and earth some time, space, and cleanliness, and they heal themselves.

Under the right conditions, life is self-healing.

It probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me to learn that the human mind is also quite capable of self-healing. Stress, fear, anxiety, tension, and even trauma, all of which have physiological as well as psychological impacts, can be self-healed. And just like with a scrape on the arm or a mower blade cut on a tree trunk, give the mind the right conditions and it will heal itself.

Some cuts do take longer to heal. Maybe they’re wider, maybe they’re deeper, maybe they’re infected. The same is true with psychological wounds. However, because we’re not typically providing the best conditions for psychological healing, including taking the physiological components of it seriously enough, I think that we’re capable of much faster and easier psychological healing than we expect.

The winter chapping of my hands, even the tiniest cuts it can produce on my fingers, can heal so well and so beautifully under the best conditions. However, I’ve also learned from my mom a great preventative trick: apply hand lotion throughout the winter. When I use lotion, the chapping develops less frequently.

Similarly, encouraging psychological healing includes post-injury and pre-injury treatment. The post-injury treatment is to provide the best possible conditions for healing, and this includes relaxation. The preventative pre-injury step is to develop understanding and resilience that makes psychological wounds, especially the deep ones, less likely to begin with.

Schools can play a valuable role in both the prevention and the treatment of our physiological, our psychological, and our spiritual injuries. We need this understanding and ability not only for ourselves individually, but also for our friends, our families, our communities, our societies, our nations, and our world.

I so appreciate your spending time with me on this journey. ❤️

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.

Getting Going

I went to the University of Maryland, and we had a 6-week winter holiday. Nearly all of my friends had just two weeks off for winter break, so there were four weeks I’d spend mostly on my own.

Each year I’d set goals for myself for break: exercise, instrument practice, writing, studying, whatever. And for four years of winter breaks, though I did read a bunch of books, I don’t think I accomplished any of those goals. So by the end of winter break, I was disappointed with myself, caught in self-judgment, and glad to return to the structure of a semester at school.

I was recently talking with a student who is caught in a similar spiral of habit-forming ineffectiveness. Fully capable of performing at a high level academically, he’s been having serious motivation issues since even before the pandemic shut-down began a year ago. His teachers see his capability, his parents see his capability, I see his capability, and he even sees it.

Yes, he sees his own capability to pull off a big win this year, but he also sees what we don’t see when we look at him: he’s tried and failed, countless times, to get himself together and get the work done. So he’s apprehensive, intimidated, and scared, and he’s anticipating another failure.

In our brief conversation between classes, I then offered him the best support I could think of in that moment. I offer these notes to you now, dear reader, in case you might also benefit from them:

First, I acknowledged his innate capacity for doing great work and coming out of this funk. We are all much more capable than we give ourselves credit for, and it’s really helpful to have another person around to remind us of that. Ask a friend or someone you trust to remind you of your strengths and capabilities.

Second, I suggested that he get grounded in the “what’s so,” or the reality, of the situation. Take 10 minutes and list out all the work he’s got to make up in each of his six classes. This step often doesn’t seem as valuable as just jumping into the work that needs to be done, but it almost always is. Personally, I clean my desk, make a list, then pick out the most important list item to jump into first.

Third, I recommended that he change his work environment. Our environment plays an often-unnoticed role in maintaining good and bad habits. If he shifts his work environment, he’s inevitably going to shift his work habit. Maybe work in a different room, sit at a different desk or table, or change the lighting during work time.

Fourth, I suggested that he reach out to someone along the way for support; it could be me, his parents, or a friend. Consistent communication with someone we trust and who cares about us can help us build new habits. A good friend of mine shared this insight with me: conversations are shared thoughts. And shared thoughts can be much more pliable, positive, inspiring, and fortifying than the typical, past-based, and self-critical thinking arising in our own minds.

Despite having a truly phenomenal academic preparation for college when I was in high school, such a fundamental and valuable skill as developing and fostering positive habits was a lesson I never learned until years after leaving the walls of my high school and university buildings.

How about we make sure no kid makes it through American schools without mastering the formation of positive habits?

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.