I am no longer growing old, I am old. And I am the product of this American wonder called public education… think those three words and preen at the glory of this democratic republic. We provide public education for everyone! From back roads and highways, the yellow buses daily bring young people to their experiences with public education.
During my decades as a teacher we thought we opened young minds to other worlds. During my student decades, the theory was that young minds, like young bodies, had to be disciplined, so we sat in one place and memorized a lot. Spelling words, times tables, Roman numerals, pi to the 10th place, the 3-4-5 right angle, axioms and postulates for Euclidian geometry, state capitals, historic dates, parts of speech and diagramming sentences, lines and lines of poetry …. we memorized as learning and sometimes as punishment. But memorize we did.
And now I am delighted that I did, delighted that bits and pieces float to the surface and I hear, “The ringing and the singing of the bells, bells, bells…” or this morning, “All the world’s a stage…” which demands some serious consideration of the present.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players, They have their exits and their entrances…
Shakespeare knew people, their strengths and weaknesses, their psychology both healthy and unhealthy, here the arrogance that needs tempered. The strongest word is “merely.” There is nothing special about any of us, we play out our lives, then exit.
How easy it is to forget that, to think that money or position or power or talent makes us any different, better or worse, from all others. We all must experience that seventh stage “sans everything” and then we exit.
I listen to the news, reluctantly at times, and I know all the newsmakers will exit just as we all will, but I think there is another element. A sign just south on Highway 23 reads, “Whatever you do, do it with kindness.”
That brings up the matter of how we live and with what grace we exit. Certainly a world leader who stands before the United Nations and declares to the world, “I hate my opponents,” is so wrapped in hate that he cannot realize kindness. He will exit in hate just as he has lived in hate.
I have also, amid the flotsam, found lines of love and beauty and laughter always with the reminder, “whatever you do, do it with kindness.”
Again, I delight in these memorized pieces without which I do not know how anyone could look at a human body and not think that “The human body is bilaterally asymmetrical” or look at a house construction and not think, “The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides.”