What I’m Reading Right Now …
©April 7th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram

I’ve been reading “Strangers Drowning” by Larissa MacFarquhar, and it’s deeply moving, deeply unsettling, deeply inspiring. After I read about people like Dorothy Granada, Aaron Pitkin, Peter Singer, Julia Wise, Baba (no last name) and Ittetsu Nemoto, I feel unbearably selfish in my life. I’ve always thought about how someone like Gandhi, who stared down the British and made them quit India, sacrificed the happiness of his family, and could justify having one at all, if he gave it all to others. I think about people like Paul Farmer, one of my heroes, who co-founded Partners in Health, along with Ophelia Dahl, Jim Yong Kim, Thomas J. White and Todd McCormack. Or, people like Anuradha Koirala, who has saved 50,000 lives from human trafficking, and does nothing but work to better the cause of downtrodden women.  I think about all those who gave unstintingly of their time, their energy, their passion and their lives, and it gives me pause.

Being a teacher was a tiny bit like that (except that I got paid for it).  I did it for seventeen years.  Each year, teaching pulled me more and more into the crazy ethos of school, which sucks the life out of you, and can take blood from a stone – yes, yes, you get a lot back, but at what cost?  It took me away imperceptibly from my time with my husband, from music, from being a writer and singer.  Then, I had my daughter, and I took back the extra time I put into school, and poured it into her, seven waking hours, and all night. I gave her everything I had.  As she grew older, more independent, I put more time back into school.  I still did a lot with her (viz., playing with her, reading to her, singing, taking her to parks, museums, the zoo, the Aquarium, and other places, and homeschooling her when I came home.  My husband did the morning and early afternoon homeschooling work with her).  The problem was that I wanted it all:  Have my time with my family, plan lessons, keep my classroom neat, colorful, operational and inspiring, grade papers thoughtfully, attend meetings and conferences, and set up, plus update my webpage for school.  It all became too much.

And though with each year, our daughter became a lot more independent, and we acted more as on-hand resources, we still put in a lot of time.  My husband and I were both exhausted.  My teaching job was the elephant in the room when I was at home.  While I loved teaching, and had a very good reputation as a creative and qualified teacher, I did not fit into the competitive and increasingly test-oriented, grade-oriented, rigidly controlled structure of school, which seemed more and more about structure than creativity and exploration.  Added to which, I was always the “oddball,” the “weird, creative one.” So, what was keeping me there, a brown person among mostly uncomprehending (and sometimes overtly disapproving ) suburban white colleagues, many of whom regarded me as some sort of aberrant entity, but a well-qualified hippie teacher?  A sense of duty?  To whom?  Why?  Money?  Well, yes, I could use the money – but not at the cost of personal happiness.  I was suffering.  I was drowning among strangers (to borrow some shadow of the title of the book I mentioned earlier).

It was time to pull out of school.  So, I did.

And it’s SO much nicer now!  I have time with my family.  I’m singing again, writing, reading, keeping house, and more.  I am around as a full-time homeschooling parent, and still have time to be by myself.  Yes, I still want to do work to improve the lives of others.  I’ve begun to do a little activism.  I want to help women in shelters, but am letting this year of freedom-from-teaching help me recover my old Self.  I want to do Black Lives Matter work, do Climate Activism, help the homeless.  I have all these goals I want to pursue AND write books, sing songs, perform Indian music, be with my family, take care of my loved ones.  I want to help teach poetry and writing in prisons, but I worry that I might get sucked into doing more and more, and I don’t want to give more than I can.  That’s because I want to make a little fortress around me and mine, and protect and guard my family’s own peace.  Is that bad?

I think if EVERYONE did something for others, but reserved some for themselves, their families, their friends, then, we COULD make the sum total of happiness increase in the world, and we would still be happy, in ourselves, for ourselves.

That’s my conclusion, and I’m sticking with it.

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