A friend recently told me about a dream they had had, in which they entered a room where many newspaper clippings and pages were hung about, dangling from the ceiling and stuck to the walls, in an apparently random way. He could not make sense of any of it as he walked through the room until he reached the opposite corner and turned around. Looking at the clippings from this different angle, it all made sense. And perhaps it is like this in our lives too; often, things seem to have neither rhyme nor reason at all until we look at them from a new perspective.
This holds true in both our personal and professional lives. Over the past few months, I have been dealing with some issues with life-changing consequences in both these areas. It would be very easy for me to just give up, to say, well, this is my life now and I guess I’d better just get used to it. But giving up or giving in is not in my nature, and in true stubborn-as-a-mule fashion, I tried just digging in my heels, and glaring at all those metaphorical newspaper clippings hanging in front of me from the first perspective I had: life as I currently knew it. A life that, up until this point, had decent prospects and provided a reasonable level of comfort.
It all started with the news of job cuts. The closure of the entire department and the campus at which I had been teaching was a devastating blow. I love my students and I love teaching. But a recent government policy decision to severely curtail the number of international students allowed into this country has necessitated deep cuts in many institutions and the first departments to be hit were inevitably those that worked most closely with ESL students. I will resist the very strong temptation here to go on a rant about the deeply flawed and populist rhetoric that led to this policy change. Suffice to say that I disagree with it personally, politically, and professionally.
But still there I was, facing major life changes. I stood there looking at those newspaper clippings on the walls, the ones that made no sense, that provided no path forward. And yet I found it very hard to move past them and so simply stood still, paralyzed by and grappling with the loss of a profession I love, loss of income, and my deteriorating mental health as option after option for further work sank from view. After all, my college was not the only one to see deep cuts and department closures. This was (is) an industry-wide crisis. Many of my fellow teachers were in the exact same position (a very cold comfort indeed).
But I could not simply stand still and let despair win. And so instead of continuing to just stare at those clippings, I immersed myself in another project, a longer term, highly engrossing writing project that combines rigorous and difficult research into primary source material, along with imagination, creative writing, and exploring talents that I had long since left behind as I focussed for so many years on the more academic side of teaching and writing. And as I did so, imperceptibly, without me even really realizing it, I began to move deeper into that room, walking past the confusion and chaos, walking past the panic and worries. In some ways, I felt a little guilty – here I was, as I saw it, indulging a passion project, using it as an escape from the Real World, which was not being a particularly happy or helpful place.
I won’t pretend that it has been easy, or that it is all over and I’ve found my Happily Ever After. But, as I reached the conclusion of the first phase of this project (a completed manuscript!) and as I looked around, turned around and started to see other sides of those stories, what I realised was that there was another way to look at things. There ‘was’ hope, and there ‘were’ opportunities, even though these were not the ones I had enjoyed previously. Starting to see things from a different perspective has given me the strength to keep going. I feel more able to face the changes and challenges ahead. From this new perspective, I am starting to see how it can all make sense.
One of my all-time favourite quotes comes from Albert Camus. I won’t give you the full quote here, but rather the part that has been foremost in my mind over what has been a very tough winter:
“In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.” - Albert Camus
