Month: August 2023
My first chair retreat
Today I’m going to be leading a retreat for the chairs in my college for the first time. I’m happy about it, and I’m also anxious.
What if it sucks? What if I suck??
I don’t want to be reductive, but I regularly draw on my teaching background in my leadership roles. Teaching is about showing students why learning something matters, giving them tools and guidance to help with learning, and giving them opportunities to apply and grow and create within (and occasionally beyond!) the structure of a class.
Teaching well is only partly about what I bring to the classroom. It is largely about what I invite and encourage students to bring to the classroom.
So as I get ready to head to this chair retreat, maybe what I need to remind myself of is my actual role. I need to offer the structures, guidance, and clarity that will invite chairs to engage in the learning and planning we’ll be undertaking today. My role is not to shine. My role is to help chairs own their power, grow a little bit, feel a bit more ready for the year ahead. My role is to help our chairs shine.
When I think about it like that, the day ahead feels like a piece of cake. Our chairs already shine, are already engaged and thoughtful leaders, already collaborate, already support their faculty and students and dean.
My job is to do my part and step out of the way so they can do theirs.
Pisces plunge
I have an affinity for water, and I don’t care for seafood.
***
I know nothing about astrology. I get a kick out of it when people do. My daughter is super fun when she talks about astrological signs, and I once had a student who guessed the astrological signs of every person in the classroom based on what she knew of them. She was remarkable.
But last week I was at the beach, playing in the cold cold waves, drawn into the tumult even as part of my body dreaded moving forward where I would get colder and wetter and more overwhelmed by the waves the Irish call “white horses” and that I grew up calling “white caps.” My friend Ann Marie does not care for full immersion in the ocean water, so I was a bit on my own, free to look around at the other people braving the waves.
And what I saw were smiles. Huge joyful grins. People glorying in the pleasure of the cold salty currents bandying us about.
***
Several months ago, my friend Jamie told me she was starting to do polar plunges with some friends of hers. I admired her daring spirit and thought I would never do that.
Then, recently, I heard a podcast about simple things to do to improve your happiness. One of the items was to make your shower cold for the last 15 seconds or longer. “Huh,” I thought. “I could do that.” Mind you, I had heard of such a thing many times prior and had always had the opposite reaction. Maybe I was inspired by Jamie this time? or maybe I just hadn’t been ready before and now I was. Whatever shifted, it shifted, and I’ve been doing the cold exciting shower finale ever since. I have to force myself each time. But I do it.
And every time, as I step out of the shower, I think, “Yes. They were right, those podcast people. I feel altogether better than I do when I have a regular old boring shower with regular old boring hot water for the duration.”
Or sometimes I think, “What a rush.”
***
I drink water all day long. I don’t do it because I’m supposed to. I do it because I love it.
***
My parents grew up on Cape Ann. Ann is my middle name. Or my middle name is Anne; it’s printed one way on my birth certificate and the opposite way on my social security card, so I guess my middle name is Ann some days and Anne with an “e” other days. Or maybe the two names don’t take turns but instead are always smushed together, making my middle name Ann with half of an “e” every day.
Regardless. I grew up regularly visiting Rockport in Massachusetts and York Beach in Maine and other places known for their sea food. When I was a kid, I ate fried clams and had trouble chewing the bellies, and I think I ate some frozen fish sticks (well, they were cooked when I ate them, but they had been frozen), and I saw live lobsters in tanks waiting to be purchased (which is briefly mentioned in this narrative of my childhood visits with my Aunt Margie in Rockport), but I didn’t eat lobster at all until a wedding rehearsal dinner in my late twenties. I had a few bites. It did not tickle my fancy.
I’ve tried seafood in various forms–clams and shrimp and crab dip and salmon and calamari and more–but I don’t care for any of it, unless you count the kind of tuna that comes in cans and that I mix with mayonnaise and spread on bread. I like that. And also I swallowed an oyster, I think, at a work reception, and that tasted a bit like the sauce that I put on it, and that moment was super fun—a bit like braving the cold ocean waves because I ate it on a dare. But, in general, seafood is not my jam.
One of my friends, many years ago, told me my dislike of seafood marked me as provincial because seafood is a staple of life across the globe. I’ve been a bit ashamed that I don’t care for seafood ever since.
But I’m getting old. Life is too short to spend energy being ashamed about not enjoying seafood. And life is too short for my friend to be so judge-y about something like the foods I prefer. What a goofy thing to have an opinion about.
I’m Pisces. I know some fish eat other fish, but I must be associated with the kind that eats other stuff, not seafood. I think I’m just rejecting cannibalism in my dislike of seafood.
Maybe Pisces is my gastrological sign. Hahahahahaha
***
It was in the midst of my joy in the ocean, and that joy reflected in the salty faces of the strangers playing in the waves alongside me, that I felt the urge to write. I mean, I didn’t want to write that moment. That would’ve been odd, and the paper would’ve been soggy, or my computer would’ve been messed up by the water, and it was just altogether not at all what I wanted to do. I just felt the urge to write and say out loud (except not out loud unless you happen to be reading this aloud, which would be great, but it’s also great if you’re just reading in your head, though I’d appreciate it if your lips kinda moved as you read along, just so you really get into what you’re reading) how awesome it is to play in the ocean at the beach, and if you haven’t done it or if you haven’t done it recently, consider trying it out. It’s really amazing.
But then, as I counted to 15 and to 15 again after turning the hot shower water to cool and turning my body to revel in the shock and aliveness of cold water against skin, I felt the urge again. Write. Yeah, yeah, not in the shower and so forth, but just, hey, say it. Say the extraordinary happiness that is the twist of a faucet away.
I don’t know why my love of drinking water and my distaste for seafood wanted to be included here, but they did.
Maybe because I’ve been listening to Ross Gay read from his Book of Delights.
Or maybe just because I’m Pisces. I have no idea what my sign means, but maybe a Pisces is someone who likes bringing random thoughts together into a quilt-y kind of pattern, or maybe it’s someone who shares random thoughts without any pattern at all, or maybe Pisces is someone who likes to express something without knowing what that something is or why she wants to express it.
Maybe all the lovely cold water and lack of protein from seafood has just scrambled my brain and y’all get to enjoy it with me, playing alongside me here on this salty page. Are you smiling? I bet you know that I am.
Laurie Mac Reads 