On vulnerability …
I'm having too many conversations with people who either feel like they have a “Kick me!” sign on their backs, or who comment more broadly about the drastically uneven weights on the “Kindness/Unkindness” scale.
At the same time, the still-mostly-benevolent-for-me-for-now algorithms of the internet, through Apple Music, have decided that I should listen to Anna Nalick's 2004 earworm “Breathe (2AM).”
Like—many, many times.
This all has me thinking about vulnerability. It's been a cornerstone of a lot of the work that I am doing, from Nurtured Heart to student voice and leadership.
I believe that the roots of American education come through a simple idea: mens sana in corpore sano, or “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” I also believe that this is meant to describe larger bodies than just a single person's—like, a school’s, or a community’s.
A lot of conversations about vulnerability are about dragging the broken parts into the light, and greeting them with love. Publicly. Do that in a responsible and deliberate way—when you’re stressed, for example—and maybe you can teach children how to regulate their own difficulties.
That's not an idea that I made up, but one that flies through just about every spiritual tradition out there, and also sits as a go-to thought exercise in cognitive behavioral therapy. Picture your frustration, your anger, your guilt—whatever—as a little child, and greet it with love. You want that child to feel better, right? Help the child feel better. That's the work of a healthy mind in a healthy body, whether the body is a single person or a classroom.
Increasing the scale, and thinking about that for a whole organization like a school—lots of our broken children are right in front of us, but there are still a whole bunch who hide. So, we greet all children with uncompromising love, and we figure out what they all need. Not “just in case,” but because the act, itself, is an object lesson that is more necessary now than ever.
What happens when we pivot the zeitgeist in this same way? Instead of saying everyone’s nasty, what could it mean to say that everyone is a potential victim of nastiness? We can all feel like we have a “Kick me!” sign on our backs, but we’re also doing really brave and wonderful work in public education to counter that—both the nastiness, and the victimhood. We work in an arena right now, though, whether we want schools to be arenas or not. Something as simple as a pride flag turns a safe space into a battlefield in the time it takes a tweet to go viral, which is very little time at all.
The realization I had for me is that half of the foes I face in the arena as I do my work are, well, myself. I can be afraid of external foes that get in the way of important work, or I can turn to the stressed inner child and, well, deal with the stress. After all, in the middle of the night, stress over doing difficult things tomorrow is a lot easier to face on the ceiling than guilt over having done nothing yesterday.
Cognitive behavioral therapists might say that when an individual starts to think about vulnerability in the face of frustration or trauma and starts to see that terrible feeling as a sad or stressed child who needs love, the visualization has the power of opening realizations about how to take care of yourself, which can lead to powerful insights into taking care of others. In turbulence or even more dire circumstances, put your oxygen mask on first before you tend to another.
As an organization, I'm wondering how powerful it would be to our adult interactions if a sad and broken child were sitting in the corner of every one of our interactions with one another. How would adults regard and talk to one another if that child were sitting quietly there, listening and learning from what they witnessed?
Children need kindness, to be sure. And not just the broken ones.
But, right now, so do we all.
For the good of the whole body.