Live Your Values, Word by Word, Piece by Piece

Me not doing what I’m supposed to…

I am likely feeling what a lot of people who share my values are feeling. It’s hard right now. I am a father of two daughters who, though we may share the same general emotions about the election results, are certainly affected in different ways than I will be. They are afraid; our family talks through it. We also know and accept that, in terms of our values, we are in the minority. This is how democracies work. Someone is always in the minority.

I don’t know if anything I write here will help, and I certainly don’t want to alienate readers I don’t know (so my apologies in advance), but here’s what I’ve told my daughters and also committed myself to: continue to live your values. Be kind to others and be supportive of those who need it. These are the things that make a difference in the world. If I think about difference making in “units of change” (it is our economic system, after all!), then I also reminded my daughters (and myself) of the following:

• Calling other people stupid and arguing online or in comments sections and general yelling into the wind = zero units of change.

• Calling the incoming President various names and spending time detailing all of his wrongs and failings = zero units of change.

• Living your values, in the form of each action you take, no matter how small = a unit of change.

As for many, yesterday (like other days) was hard because of who I am and what I value as a person. But here’s what I did, as it’s my job, and I will switch to the pronoun “we” so that we can do all this together. Ready?

Yesterday we had a class to teach for incarcerated students, and it’s about a 50-minute drive. (I will also shift tenses because that is change.) We listen to some songs we like along the way. Sometimes we sing.

The students, because we are in a unit on creative writing, have poems due today. Pantoums. Exciting! The students are going to read us their poetry, pantoums, in class. We can’t wait.

We call the poems Pantoums from Prison. They understand the form. They understand the type of subject matter that fits well with words that function as refrains, that repeat, that move down the page like escalators in descent.

We sit on a desk and listen to our students read us their poems. After each individual reading we comment on the music of the poems. We recite back to them—with only the words still hovering in the air as reference—the images, the assonance and consonance still humming in our ears. We tell them how powerful their work is and they are thrilled. They want to do more.

We ask the next student to read and he says he has written three pantoums. Which one do we want to hear? Why not all of them, we say. The forms and structure sound like freedom.

The last remaining student reads his pantoum to us. He is smart, a good writer, and has a rich inner mind, but he has trouble expressing himself verbally. He often trips over words, even though he clearly knows their definitions and purpose in his work. His mouth is like a pen that sometimes stops releasing ink and then you have to do that thing where you draw a line across the paper, then again, to make the ink return. Once, twice, three times, no ink.

The word he is trying to say, the final word of his pantoum, is “tragedy.” He keeps tripping on it and feels embarrassed. We decide not to let go, we are going to do this small thing together, no matter how long it takes. So we stop him on that word: “tragedy.” The room goes silent and is focused only on us. The others root for him to step over this hurdle.

We say, let’s break the word into three parts, are you ready?

He nods.

We say, let’s start with the end parts. Uh dee. Uh dee. Like you are saying “here’s a letter dee.”

He says it once, then again, then again. Perfect. Uh dee. Uh dee. Uh dee.

Then we say , think of the letter “j” and how it sounds. “Traj.” We say it again. “Traj.”

Then he says it. Perfectly. He says it again.

Now, we say, add the ending.

Traj-uh-dee. Traj-uh-dee. Tragedy. Tragedy. Tragedy.

He nods. Says, I got it. We feel we have just done the most important kind of teaching there is in this world.

He reads his poem to us again. Takes it from the top. The first line of his pantoum ends in the word “tragedy,” spoken clearly. The last line of his pantoum ends in the word “tragedy,” spoken clearly. We think it’s beautiful.

One unit of change.