The man that I'm loosely named after was a teacher. He could have just as easily been a stage performer. Doc is one of the most charismatic people that I have ever known, and even in the lessons I took with him long after old age had stolen his prime, I could see it. I could see the passion that made my Dad walk out of his lectures feeling like maybe there was some genuine hope and maybe, just maybe, we weren't all crazy after all.
Doc lectured in circles. He didn't think in a linear fashion and so he didn't teach in one either. This was never more evident then when he turned to the blackboard. Even after whiteboards and Power Point made their way into lecture halls, Doc still dragged a blackboard with him everywhere. I don't know why. He would begin a lecture by drawing a giant circle on the black board and then in rapid fire succession he would fill that circle with words, notes, phrases and then in a way that you had to see to believe he would tie them all together and before you could get it all down, he had erased the circle and it's contents and drawn another empty circle to fill. The old man could go on like this for hours. If the class period was up and he hadn't yet made his point he would look at the clock and say "Well I guess you can go, it's no big deal . . . it's only man's place in the scope of Creation that is at stake." And everyone would smile, and almost no one ever left. He could talk for hours because people were willing to listen.
By the end of a class period, the board was a mess. More gray than black, the thick layer of dust left a perpetual haze over the palette that he had cleaned so many times. No matter how hard you tired to erase the board, you could never get it clean. Sure, it would come clean enough so that you could read what he had written with his fresh stick of chalk, but the remnants of lectures past were always up there, refusing to go away, lending their own quiet voice to whatever the topic of the moment was that had the present honor of being clearly scripted.
And that is how I'm seeing life right now.
I'm cleaning a lot of things off my palette. I really wanted to stay away from the cliche of the clean slate, but there it is. Jeff says I'm purgating and I'm not really sure what that means, but I think it may have something to do with getting rid of stuff. That makes sense, because I've been realizing a lot lately that I have been carrying some beliefs around, and holding on to them really tightly, that I don't think are true. It's been hard to admit that things which have been an inherent part of who I am for so long aren't what I thought they were, but it feels kinda good to let them go.
Of course, we're talking about blackboards here; and not brand new ones. We're talking about a blackboard that is staring 34 dead in the eyes and has had plenty of circles, ideas, dreams, and lectures written upon it. A lot of them have already been erased. A few are still up there that will be erased soon. For every one though, that has been erased, a thin film of chalk has been left. By now, my blackboard is pretty hazy. It is my past refusing to completely disappear, always lending its own voice, reminding me of where I came from and what I used to be. And that makes me happy. I'm standing back and reading the pages of my life like a dirty chalkboard and eventually, maybe one day, the layers of the past will be so thick that the presently honored script doesn't seem so important.
I think I'm going to keep purgating. It feels good to lighten the load. It helps me see better, hear better, and in some weird way, be better. In reality, I'm not getting rid of anything, I'm just re-arranging chalk dust.
No comments:
Post a Comment