What Do You Know?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been told in the past, and I pass it along from time to time, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

We can only learn something, we can only know something, when we are ready.

What do I know now?  One thing.

I am happy.

Given all that is wrong in the world at this point, that might be a surprising or even a disappointing statement. Be either surprised or disappointed as it gives you pleasure.

But I am happy.

There is scientific research that says--much to the surprise, or perhaps, disappointment of some--older people are happier.  So it could just be that my happiness is a consequence of statistics. I am open to that. 

But I’ve got my own reasons.

I am back in the classroom full time after an absence of many years.  Okay, truth be told, I never quit teaching, but teaching one or two classes a semester is not the same as teaching four classes and the teaching thereof being your raison d’etre. 

It’s not so much the teaching per se as being back at my calling.  I am doing what I was put on this earth to do.

The happiness comes from a combination of that and having become old enough to realize that.

Perhaps at a more basic level happiness comes from wanting to do what you are doing, not doing what you want.  Feel free to go back into that sentence with a compass, a sextant, and a notepad and explore it a while.

As I look back at previous times, I see myself as doing something, but resenting that I wasn’t doing something else. I wasn’t trying to find the joy in the task at hand, but simply wishing it would be over.

I will admit that there are some activities that are objectively unpleasant.  What I am talking about is, lecturing in class, but wishing I was preparing a lesson; preparing a lesson, but wishing I was doing research; doing research but wishing I was spending time with my family; spending time with my family, but wishing I was reading.

And so on.

With the passage of time comes, perhaps, an appreciation of activities for being themselves.

Okay, I don’t like to grade papers.  If I said I did, they would stick me in a straight-jacket and drag me away by my heels.

And rightly so.

But I’ve learned the art of owning the grading of papers as part of my chosen profession.

I think that is part of the happiness that comes with aging: the knowing of oneself.

There are certain mysteries that we are presented with in the course of our lives.  At least there have been for me.  These are things I think about in the night, both as I lay awake, but also in my dreams.

These are mysteries which I am at the boundaries of my intelligence even to think about.  They are mysteries that stretch me.

Recently, I’ve been waking up during the night, and saying, “That’s it. I understand now.  I could explain it to someone.”

The thing to do would be to get up, go to my computer, and write those thoughts down.  Share my pearls with you.

Instead, I roll back over and drift off again.

The answers--and even the questions that evoked the answers--are gone by the morning.  The only thing left is the feeling that I’ve encountered the Transcendent in the night and it has escaped.

An artifact of my happiness, and perhaps the cause of it, is that I am okay with that. I’ve mapped the Abyss; I’ve plumbed its depths; I’ve witnessed the battle of Gog and Magog; and I have let it go.

And I’m okay with having let it go, because I am happy.

Or am I happy because I am now able to let it go.

Perhaps the solution that can only be grasped in the darkness of the wee hours is best left in the darkness of the wee hours.

Knowledge comes to us when we are ready to receive it.  That is something I know from my calling as a teacher.  

The knowledge that has come to be now is that I am happy.

I suppose I was ready for that.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.