The other day, in response to filling out Brunswick’s climate survey, with its large questions and implicit hopes for the future, I found myself thinking back to my teaching life. As I considered again the routine of that life, I was wondering (again) about the thousand little decisions that occurred in every class. What had I been hoping to achieve? How might we get there?
A teacher lives a class period in a state of hyperawareness, tracking (and, on a good day, weaving) both the threads of discussion and the simultaneous connections and disconnections happening all around them. It is far from a routine experience, even if it happens every day. “It was exhausting and startling,” I said to myself. And the word “startling” stirred familiar memory.
Whenever my students reached the chapter “Higher Laws” in the book “Walden,” I girded myself for their responses. Already poked and prodded for some 200 pages, they entered this chapter’s room to find that woods-loving, pine-needle-appreciating Henry Thoreau had adopted the tone of a scold. Worse yet, he had decided to take on appetite and its physicality, areas of life that 17-year-olds were exploring with more than a little fascination.
As he warmed to his lesson, Thoreau wrote the following:
“If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats and other such savage tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the millpond, she to her preserve pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking.”
And he also means, but doesn’t say until a bit later, answering our appetite for sex.
“Oh, please,” I recalled one student saying and dropping her book in disgust at this point. “What’s the alternative?” And in that moment, I had thought, “Exactly; that’s exactly the question Thoreau wants,” because he follows this wondering with one of the book’s memorable, compact moments: “Our whole life is startlingly moral,” he writes.
“What’s that mean?” I’d ask, and silence usually ensued. Into it I then trickled this question: “Did you take a shower this morning?” A little nervous laughter. Teachers are weird, I saw them thinking. “Okay,” said one. “I’ll bite; yes, I took a shower.” And in the discussion that followed, we talked about warm water versus cold and energy use, about soap and its types, about whether or not shampoos had been animal tested on sensitive eyes. “What swirled down the drain and where does it go?” we asked each other.
What about your lunch? What about your shoes? Your belt? Your bag? Your laptop? Where do all these pieces of the physical world come from and where do they go? Questions stacked up rapidly; it became easy to imagine a point of paralysis. I also noticed that we were all leaning forward over our tables and suggested that we sit back and take a deep breath. “Now, I don’t think Thoreau wants us to drown in a welter of micro-decisions,” I said, “but he does want your initial question to be alive always in our minds. What’s the alternative? seems exactly on point.”
“So there’s the connection with his central theme of being awake, of questioning habit,” said another student. “You have to be fully awake to even think that there’s an alternative, and then to think what that alternative might be. There’s an awakeness about being startled.”
Yes, there is; we wake from the complacency of routine, of herd-life, with a start; we begin to think as and be individuals as a start. And that’s part of what I wanted for my students and for myself.
Climate problems are huge; for many of us, consideration leads to a point of paralysis or insignificance. But looking up into the trees, down into a stream, at the little daily decisions of food and travel, of use, brings it back to Earth, to the patch of ground we are on, to our immediate lives. There, the micro-changes we make may add up to startling moments of insight or redemption.
And you, reader? What startles you?
• • •
I went to the first public climate action meeting, organized by Brunswick’s Environmental Planner Ashley Charleson and her climate action task force (chairpersons: Mark Battle and Rebecca Lincoln) and held at the Coffin School. I was pleasantly surprised to find more than 100 people attending. People sat in a semicircle during a presentation about climate and assessment of a locale’s effects on it from the Greater Portland Council on Government. And then they dispersed to tables equipped with more information and cards upon which citizens could write questions and offer opinions to Brunswick’s Climate Task Force as they develop a plan. The climate survey remains available at their site; I encourage you to take a few minutes to respond. I also encourage you to take a look at the Brunswick task force’s materials at brunswickme.org/710/Climate-Action-Task-Force.
Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, the chairperson of Brunswick’s Conservation Commission, serves on the Mare Brook Steering Committee, is a member of Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors and writes Your Land, a monthly column in The Times Record. He also writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.
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