Mantra

I’m making a fresh start! Taking a different tack! Blazing a new trail! Hoping to be helpful!

What are you doing, Betsy?

you might ask.

I’m going to start offering mantras. Pithy little sayings, solid little handles you can grab onto when you feel anxious or overwhelmed or sad or bewildered or just pissed about how weird life has become.

Because in this time of scatter and uncertainty and decentralization I think one of the best things any of us can do is to re-center and ground ourselves. So here goes.

The mantra for this week — based on this week’s blog post — is this question:

What matters?

If you strip away all the noise — in your house, in your head, in your lesson plan, in your sense of responsibility — what is the bare bones thing that you want to focus on

• today?

• in each class?

• in this next hour?

• right now?

We know in our guts what matters. And yet we let all sorts of noise distract us from it. Some of us are even addicted to distraction. (And addiction, I suggest, is the ultimate distraction.)

Now’s the time to focus and commit. To ourselves, to our inherent wisdom.

Ohm, my friends.