Searching for Newness in the Old: Lessons From Tolstoy

Over the last month as I’ve neared the halfway point of my time in Kerala, I’ve struggled to find newness in my old routine of work and teaching. This was my greatest challenge for the long month of January. After coming back to Nicholson School after the Christmas holidays, it quickly began clear to me that my life at the school had become old news to me and similarly that I had become old news to the school. The novelty of living in a new environment and completely foreign culture had mostly worn off, and I was left with the routine of preparing classes, teaching, and going about my daily activities. I felt like I had lost the freshness.

Some particular examples of how my routine began to feel stale during the last month:
• Some things that used to give me deep delight no longer spark me in the same way. For instance, I no longer get absurdly happy every time I have a moderately successful conversation in Malayalam. But this is because I now regularly have successful conversations; so what used to be an intermittent source of deep delight, is now a daily routine. (Don’t misunderstand me: it’s wonderful that my Malayalam has improved enough that I can have communicate some, but I’ve lost the delight that used to accompany these small successes in language.)
• The fun of teaching classes has faded some as it has become routine both for me and for the students. As I result I feel like my classes have begun to lack the energy and innovation that I used to consciously put into them.
• Some social and cultural differences that I used to be able to tolerate fairly gracefully, really began to irritate me during the last month. In particular I’ve been frustrated with the pressure that the Indian education system places on the 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students. They are constantly pressured to study so that they will have good grades. As a result, they have practically no free time in which to play or rest or relax. And usually they aren’t getting enough sleep because they feel so pressured to study early in the morning and late at night. My frustration with this system came out in helpful and unhelpful ways over the past month. It’s probably good that I’ve told the other teachers that I think the students should sleep more and have more free time. But when I’m so irritated that I can’t properly listen to the students’ personal and academic struggles, my frustration with the system is actually harmful.

I have been working hard during the last month to find newness in my old routine and to overcome my frustrations with the Kerala education system. I did this by adding a few new activities to my routine in January. One of the most rewarding additions has been the yoga class that I teach once a week for 11th and 12th grade students. At first I felt very strange as an American teaching a yoga class in India, the country where yoga originated. But the girls at the school have no one else to teach them, and they want to learn. More than that, I think they need the time to relax their minds and stretch their bodies since they have to spend so much time in the classroom studying. Teaching yoga has become a joy for me, and it is also a constructive way through which I can combat the demanding educational system by giving the girls some much needed time away from their studies.

In my attempt to add new activities to my schedule in January, I also took on a project that turned out to be larger than I anticipated. I directed a play.



Drama at Nicholson

I had never directed a play before this year. Nor had I ever been in charge of auditions or costumes or writing the script. This January, I did all of these things. I adapted Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Three Questions” into a drama, and in less than two weeks, we put on a play. The nine Middle School students in the cast were wonderful. They worked hard to memorize their lines in a short amount of time, and they were always willing to practice, even at somewhat inconvenient times. But I had no idea how much work it would be to single-handedly organize a play. Even if it was only a one-act school play.

The two weeks that I spent directing and organizing “The Three Questions” were incredibly stressful for me. And as the stress built I caught myself getting easily frustrated with those around me, teachers and students and cast members alike. I had to consciously push my stress and frustration away. After all, Tolstoy’s story – and thus our play – hinges on the lesson of living in the present. A King asks three questions: Who is the most important person? What is the most important time? And what is the most important thing to do? The answers he finally receives constitute the lesson that I was desperately trying to relearn this past month:

- The most important time is now, because it’s the only time in which we have any power.
- The most important person is the one whom you are with.
- The most important this is to do good for that person.

And as I struggled to relearn Tolstoy’s old truth, the students managed to perform a play that included humor, pantomime, a sword fight, tomato-sauce-blood, and a serious moral. When it was all over, I was relieved that it had gone relatively smoothly, that the audience seemed to enjoy it, and that the girls had fun with this chance to perform.




Directing “The Three Questions” was one of my attempts to add “new things” to my old routine, but because of its subject matter, it also fueled a different approach to my attempt at overcome my feelings of frustration and staleness.

Finally, all good things lose their novelty, but I think this loss is mostly due to our inability to see old things with new eyes. I realized that I do not need to find new things to add to my routine in order to make it fresh; instead I need to open my eyes wider. I need to stop and breathe and really look at everything around me. I need to reorient myself to the present moment and to the people whom I am with. And by doing this, I am beginning once again to find new beauty in the everyday: I see it in the excited faces of a group of eighth grade students when they get to go on a field trip to see a waterfall. I feel it in the nervous energy of nine girls waiting offstage before they perform a play. I hear it in voices of fourth graders singing hauntingly in Malayalam.

And slowly the beauty of the present seeps into me again, filling me with newfound joy and love.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Thank you to everyone who has donated to my fundraising account with PC(USA). I truly appreciate your generosity, which enables me to live out this year of service in Kerala. I am still $3,500 short of my $9000 fundraising goal. If you are interested and able to support me financially this year, you can make a tax-deductible gift by following this link to my account page with PC(USA): http://www.pcusa.org/give/online/projectSelectAction.do?numberString=E210401

A-Hunting We Will Go: The Great Spider Hunt

I have been terrified of spiders since I was very young. In fact when I was little, if I found a spider I would run from the room and find someone else to kill it before I would venture into that room again. Gradually my fear lessened, and by the time I was in college I could kill some small spiders myself – but only after staring at them in frozen terror for some time with a shoe in my hand poised for the kill. So I’m happy to say that in the last five months I have (mostly) faced and overcome my fear of spiders. Here’s how it happened:

With its beautiful tropical climate, Kerala is home to the Huntsman Spider, a variety of large, though relatively harmless, spiders. (I couldn’t bring myself to post a picture of one here, but you can see it by going to this web address: http://www.westaust.net/wildlife/huntsman_spider.jpg) These beasties are usually about the size of a closed fist . I know that there are bigger, scarier, and more dangerous spiders in the world, tarantulas and black widows for example. However, having grown up in a place where the freezing winters keep anything larger than a wolf spider away, I viewed these spiders as both huge and terrifying. The first time I saw one in my room here I went into a frozen oh-my-God-that’s-a-giant-spider panic and simply stared at it from the other side of my room. It took me about half an hour to work up the courage to get near it and finally chase it out the window with a broom. Since that first sighting though, I’ve become less frightened. I think my fear has abated somewhat because I know that no one else will kill these spiders for me, and I don’t want to go to sleep at night knowing that the spider I couldn’t kill is hanging out in my room with me. So I learned to kill the giant spiders, thereby keeping my room safe from mysterious giant web-weavers.

During the last week of January one of these giant spiders evaded me. It moved into my bathroom, and refused to be killed. I chased it maybe half a dozen times, but it always escaped into a crevice or pipe where I couldn’t reach it. But I knew it hadn’t moved out of my bathroom because it would turn up in the most unfortunate places. Once I caught it hiding behind the bucket I use to shower, and another time (horror of horrors) it was sitting inside the toilet bowl after I had flushed, fulfilling every child’s fear that there is a monster living in the toilet.

On the afternoon of February 1st this persistent spider finally crossed the line. As I flushed the toilet in my bathroom the giant spider leaped out of the toilet bowl at me, and despite my recently lessened fear of spiders, I screamed. In all fairness, I can’t blame it for trying to avoid death by drowning by leaping out of the flushing toilet. If I were the spider, I would have done the same. But it was the last straw. The Great Spider Hunt had begun. For the rest of the day I stalked this spider. I came back to my room at random moments trying to catch it in a vulnerable position on the floor or walls of the bathroom. I finally did catch it that evening, and I’m happy to say that it will not be haunting my bathroom or jumping out of my toilet anymore.

There are many different (and sometimes uncomfortable) things about my life in India that I have accepted fairly easily: Washing my clothes by hand in the sink; showering with a bucket of cold water; having very little control over my diet; substituting water for toilet paper; living with lizards. I needed time at first to adjust to these changes in my lifestyle, but after a short time I easily grew accustom to them. However, I refuse to share my room with giant spiders. Certainly, I will not share my toilet with them.


(More January updates coming soon!)