Why So Serious

I’ve been noticing a fundamental shift in my personality as of late. Or more accurately, a restoration.

I’ve always been a serious person; always very goal-oriented and workman-like. I haven’t been writing a lot about teaching this school year because I don’t find the need to. If you noticed, there has been none of the heady idealism that characterized my entries in the past year. But if you read my blog now (THE blog, that is), you’ll see the workman very much alive.

I go to work in the morning, proficiently do whatever I have to do, not waste my time on things that will keep spinning without me, and leave the moment I can. The time I spend out of school I spend conserving my energy, learning new things, and doing other simpler work. Having learned not to spread myself out too thinly, my work ethic has become that of a professional hitman: I come in silently, accomplish my task, and leave no trail behind. I appear dispassionate but underneath I describe it more accurately as ‘detached passion’.

I love my work. Not in the sense that there is nothing else I’d rather be doing, but in the sense that of everything else I could be doing, I choose this. It’s a more realistic kind of love. It’s also less stressful, and yet it’s crazy. I haven’t rolled out laughs this good in quite a while.

I am my own worst critic, and when I look at my work as a teacher, I see a lot of things in the past I’ve done wrong. But mistakes you make when you are unprepared are forgivable and fixable. The mistakes you make when you buy into your own hype is the worst kind. I’ve committed a lot of the latter and so this year I learned to tune out everything I want to hear and focus on those I need to hear.

And thus I’ve evolved to become brutally pragmatic. I think I’ve always been, but I’ve also been a heady romantic with no respect for the impossible. I miss it. But what can I say? We grow up. I’ve channeled my emotional energy into a fuller self-awareness, and this explains how I care for things even more powerfully now without showing it overtly. After all, the truth of passion is seen through its consequences; the reality of love can only be shown through action.

Darn. That sounded rather Darth. Cool.