Hiding

I hide behind a veil of doing.  I manage my time and tasks so they fill the spaces in my brain with check-lists, wish lists, and pity parties over my self created chaos.  I am complicit.  I am in my own way.  The work I seek to do is overwhelming, yet critical.  This puts me in a catch-22.  I cannot work without addressing deeply entrenched issues of equity, inclusion and exclusion yet in working I cannot begin to unravel how to enter the conversation.  So behind my veil of doing I state "if only I had the time".  Well, folks, the reality is that I do have the time.  We all have time.  I just make conscious choices about how to spend my time that does not leave space for that which I seek to do.  I am in my own way.  Not you.  Not the system.  Not the course work.  Me.

Well, phew.  That's a relief.  All this time I thought the system was out to get me.  Looks like I've got some re-prioritizing to do.  Do you?

This might be all I have to say on the topic.  It seems to sum things up.  But does it?  Here I sit in my beautiful home.  My husband across the way working his corporate deals with reggae in the background, over looking my pool.  All the while my children are safe and secure at the local, not cheap, Montessori school, developing their individual cognition, creativity and leadership skills.  They are there not because I lack commitment to public education, but because I desire for them more than standards and test scores. 

            So how then am I complicit in that I seek to change?  In everyway I am.  Yet, would I change?  That is a serious question I have to battle with.  And that battle is going to have to start- veil or no veil. 

            You see- I have power.  I have white skin.  I have a nuclear family (not historically, but I have one now) and I am heterosexual.  I don’t profess to hold, at least publicly, non-traditional religious views and I have wealth.  No, not an exuberant amount- but enough to allow me many options and many opportunities of both need and extravagance. I indulge both.  This is not meant to be a personal self- disclosure.  It is meant to poignantly illustrate (to both my readers and myself) that I embrace and reproduce with my life all the social norms that are created and maintained in American society.  I am part of the inertia I speak against. 

            I push the edges in my own mind with the work I seek to do, but yet in my own life I can’t push even one.  Why is that?