No Resolutions for 2022 - just continuing my Pilgrimage
“And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?” - Rumi
A pilgrimage is a sacred journey, one that is often spiritual in nature. A pilgrim seeks awakening, meaning, and purpose. Pilgrimages are often taken to divine sites, shrines, temples - holy places - which may take long periods of time to reach.
A few months ago, I came to a stark realization. I have been embarking on a pilgrimage for the past two years. Each moment of elation, however, from accomplishments Chey and I experienced as a team, or I experienced as an individual, were followed by an inevitable dip in my motivation or resolve. But that data line of enlightenment kept rising. I was still ascending, although I was walking through many seemingly deep and dark valleys along the way.
This is what a pilgrimage is. It’s not meant to be easy, it’s not meant to be a lovely stroll to get to a place where all of a sudden everything in life will make sense. It’s scary, it’s challenging, and it will test your resilience in different ways along the entire way. And that is the enlightenment that we are ultimately seeking. As our good friend Ilene Winokur often reminds me, it’s about the journey, and never about the destination.
The most encompassing definition of the term “Pilgrimage” I found was from Wikipedia: A pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about themselves, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life.
The only part that I disagree with is the “return to their regular daily life.” I don’t know that once we have embarked on our pilgrimage we can ever “return” to anything as it was before. We are different, the people and the material things around us don’t appear the same way. And I believe that is the point.
There are 3 areas of my life that I decided required a “pilgrimage.” I needed to journey deep into myself within the separate realms of my personal life, my side-hustle life, and my educational life. Ultimately, the destination would likely be a common one, and these 3 roads I was taking were undoubtedly going to merge into the same clearing. I segmented these routes in order to compartmentalize the many events and experiences in my life, and to identify the roots from which they arrived in the first place.
The path of my educational world takes up a lot of space in my life, and it’s a long and winding one, filled with many muddy regions, creeks that require crossing, and fallen trees to overcome, and it also intertwines with the other paths that I walk along in my journey. A few years ago, I began to feel like I was doing it all blindly. I was walking along with my eyes covered, undoubtedly in circles, and had learned all the nuances of my sidewalk along the way.
And there’s nothing wrong with knowing your route very well. But the course that we know can become very repetitive and monotonous, especially after it becomes supremely efficient. I wasn’t learning anything new about my journey by walking along the same path every day, nor was I learning anything about myself and how I handled potential challenges of the “new.”
Going off the beaten path has taught me new things about the world that exists beyond my daily route, and it has also taught me so much about how I deal with the changes I experience in my environment. Will I evolve fast enough to take in the life-shifts put in front of me, or will I fail and find myself walking in safe circles again? Of course, neither of these is the right or wrong answer, and I have done both during my pilgrimage.
Since Chey and I started The Staffroom Podcast, every part of my academic world has been challenged, from relationships to assessment practices, to passion projects, to student agency. I’ve soaked in more information about Ed-concepts and pedagogies I didn’t even know existed prior to this leg of the journey.
The birth of the podcast was a cataclysmic event resulting from several moments, decisions and by-chance-happenings all coming together to create a monumental big-bang occurrence. When I look back at the decision-making process of our beginnings, in reflection, they don’t seem to be as humble as we have often made them out to be. Several situations lined up perfectly to allow us to come together and “on a whim” decide that we were going to give this project a shot.
In the past two years, and precisely because of this out-of-this-world initiative, I’ve turned my entire vocational practice onto its head. I knew I needed to for some time, I just didn’t know how to take the first step or even what to do. The podcast, and all the change that came with it, gave me the tools I needed to make those adjustments to my practice. And although one could say that the Covid-19 Pandemic threw a huge wrench into our plans, it actually gave me a new environment and opportunity to test some of my learning that I wouldn’t have otherwise had an opportunity to do so, and perhaps that is a Teaching Gain.
I tried different ways of interacting with students, from community circles to full-day conversations. I’ve discarded an entire week’s worth of plans in order to address more pertinent social justice issues that have arisen, something that would have caused me great stress and anxiety in past years, to the point of me not even attempting to address them.
My assessment strategies have shifted so vastly that I now view grading in a different way, and am working to consolidate my thoughts on how to optimize this whole process in my practice. I’ve created a variety of assessments for exactly the same learning target so that more of my students can be successful. I no longer look at assessment as a way to “test” student knowledge, but now as a way to “affirm” it. I’ve even had the time and have been gifted the knowledge to be able to differentiate between the two.
I’ve gained insights into leadership - the skills and practice that are required to be successful at leading, and in the many capacities that one can indeed lead. I’ve come to realize that my mother was right when I was 13 years old and that I am, in fact, a leader. She may not have meant it in the most positive light at the time, but I held on to that statement, perhaps at that time to one day prove her wrong, but instead, so proud to prove her right. I chose to sit at the back for so many years of my life, knowing full well that I actually deserved to also be sitting at the front. My voice deserved to be heard, and although I’m still working on having the courage to put myself out there to be heard, I’ve gained successes in this area of which I am so happy with.
Resolutions are wonderful ways to set goals for ourselves, and I’ve done this every year for as long as I can remember. Some years the goals were isolated and short-term, and some years the goals have linked to the “big picture” that is my life and took years to accomplish or fail at. I shifted to a greater outlook more recently and intentionally when reflecting on the concept of time. January 1st doesn’t and shouldn’t signify the start of anything, as we have been conditioned to choose this arbitrary date as our beginning, our fresh start, our initiation.
If we continue to observe life as flowing, then there are no start dates and there are no end dates, and there are no goals, even. There is just enlightenment, and only our personal journeys can define what that enlightenment entails over the course of our own individualistic lives. This is our personal raison d’être; our why.
The Staffroom Podcast, now known as The Chey and Pav Show, has become a deep and imperative part of my cosmic and spiritual journey. It led to me wanting to embark on evolving so many different areas of my life. This was IT. This was supposed to happen, right now in my life - I needed this. After years of walking, running, jumping, falling, crawling, flying, falling, and falling again, I think I have made it to base camp in my life’s pilgrimage. Now all I have to do is aim for the summit.
- Pav
"Pilgrimage - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrimage. Accessed 30 Dec. 2021.
