oliviaobryon

Today when I logged into my blog, I had to change the background.  Seeing something that reminded me of school made me not want to write.  Apparently, teacher brain has its limits, and I’ve reached them.  This week is about delineating work and home.  It is also about consciously working toward happiness.

Yesterday was a rough day of school.  The students were extra challenging, my air conditioning broke, and I found myself trying to have a chips and salsa party in a room full of thirty sweating 9 year-olds.  The combination of 85 degrees Fahrenheit and 25 grams of sugar in the “natural” box drinks that I purchased was too much.  Note-to-self, I am not the kind of teacher that enjoys unstructured time.

It seemed like a good way to help them remember our acronym for editing and revising (CHIPS & salsa), but it turned out to be more of a headache than it was worth.  I spent the whole day trying to keep everything positive so that we would not lose our party by the end of the day, but it tanked by 2:30 PM when the sugar and the heat hit simultaneously.  Today I made up for it by being lightning fast in my consequences and allowing the tone to shift into negative territory when it needed to, (something I avoided yesterday), and it felt so much better.  I admire teachers who can keep it positive ALL the time but I also recognize that for my own sanity I have to use what works for me, which is a combination of both negative and positive tones.  I feel like I learned a really important lesson.

After my semi-disastrous Monday, (I’m sure it wasn’t entirely disastrous, it just felt that way to my OCD, perfectionist self), I came home feeling really unhappy.  Being a little on the OCD side of the spectrum can be dangerous as a teacher.  Not only can it keep you in your classroom far beyond the call of duty in the evening rearranging desks and tidying up the upheaval of the day, but it can also result in an unrealistic expectation of what teaching should look like.  Yesterday I was feeling really down on myself for not being able to successfully use a positive vibe all-day-long to trick my students into being complacent angels.

When I got home, I found myself calculating how my teaching career could be a stepping stone to something else that interests me, like policy work, curriculum design, a PhD, founding new schools, writing…  And that’s when it hit me that I’m back to a spot that I routinely get to where I have to take control of my own happiness instead of counting the days until I can be happy again.  Happy now, no matter the circumstances, instead of happy someday.

As I’ve said before, happy for me is sometimes a conscious effort, instead of something that just magically happens.  As I pushed my tired body through an hour of yoga last night, I really focused on what I want and what motivates me to teach.  Already, teaching has been such a roller coaster for me.  I’m obviously passionate about it and why it matters, but some days are really hard.  Some weeks are really hard.  As it’s turning out, some months are really hard.  Spending 60+ hours a week doing a job that is far underpaid for the amount of expertise, energy, and love required can feel confusing.  I’ve heard it called the hardest job on earth, and some days it feels like it.  But, the challenge is also what keeps OCDers like me enthralled.  It is such an intricate web of demands that I feel much more engaged and mentally stimulated than I did writing economic reports on some very complex topics (mezzanine loan structures anyone? Bueller?).  It’s funny, when I was fresh out of college, I always assumed that teaching elementary school would be too elementary to be engaging, but so far I am very very very wrong.

That said, I still don’t know that teaching is the key to my long term happiness, but last night the conclusion that I reached was that it does not matter.  Instead of thinking long term, I need to think right now, which is teaching.  How do I make the most of each day and consciously cultivate happiness?

Ironically, part of the answer to this question is creating clearer boundaries between work and home, since it has all been blurring together lately.  The biggest irony of this is that I started my blog today by changing the background away from school but it is still all that I ended up talking about.  Oh well.  I guess that teacher brain prevails again.  The good news is that I’m already feeling happier in my reminder that happiness is sometimes a conscious process.  I’m also happy in my hell-bent desire to take a good vacation soon.  The only question is tropical, South America, or Europe…  At least I have the time off to make it happen!

Even a weekend in Tahoe is sounding pretty damn satisfying about now.  😉

Today is the best day of my life. I have that written on my refrigerator and remind myself of it anytime that I start to feel ungrateful or unhappy, (even on the most exciting days, there are still moments when I have to remind myself of this).  It is true though.  As much as days past bring me happiness in their memories and days coming bring me happiness in their anticipation, no day compares to the only day that I have right now, today.  It is amazing how just reminding myself of this while sitting in traffic or doing household chores centers me into a space of gratitude and presence in the moment.  This whole pursuit of happiness thing is not a new arena for me, I’ve read all kinds of books and taken little gems here and there, but I find that it is the little daily reminders that actually make the biggest difference for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually consider myself a pretty happy person.  I just find that maximizing my happiness requires ongoing maintenance, reminders, and study.  I am in the middle of reading The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin, which is actually part of what inspired me to start a blog as a space to keep my writing fresh and find happiness in something that I enjoy doing, writing.  I love books like her’s because even if our views on happiness and life may not be precisely the same, I always gain little gems from other people’s experiences, (which is part of what I love about reading other people’s blogs!). 

In the book, she talks about a study where people were asked to rate their happiness on a scale from 1-10.  On a recent road trip, my husband and I talked about where we rated ourselves a year ago and today, and I came to the crazy realization that in just one year, I had brought my happiness from a 5 to a pretty consistent 8-9!  Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be on summer vacation, taking a road trip through the beautiful forests of Oregon with my husband and my dog when rating my happiness… But, I think that’s where the 8-9 comes in.  At that moment, I was probably at a 9-10, but in the realities of life, my happiness fluctuates and probably averages out at about an 8.5.

The point in sharing my self-perceived happiness is not to gloat or paint an unreal picture of my life.  Having just completed a year-long boot camp of full-time co-teaching and earning my master’s degree in my spare hours while dealing with the day-to-day struggles of low-income students, learning to hold my own in a classroom, navigating the realities of securing a job, and balancing the needs of my family and friends, my life has not been without recent challenges.  However, what is so striking about all of this, is not that my life is easier than it was a year ago, but that it is significantly better despite its huge challenges!  Am I happy every moment of everyday?  No.  But overall I’m a happier person and it was within my power to change my own happiness.  That is what I want to share. 

So, how did I find this happiness?  In part, it began with my quest to seek out as many points of view on happiness as I could.  But, more so, it came from the courage to walk away from something secure and outwardly respected to something scary, new, uncertain, and with far less pay, (a point that ironically hung me up the most and in the end has mattered the least!)… I quit my job as an economic analyst at a respected consulting firm to become a teacher in an urban, low-income school.  I left behind a period of time in my life that was characterized by frequent anxiety and pretty deep lows in search of something better.  The biggest part of this leap of faith was actually believing that something better truly existed.

The year spent in this endeavor changed my life.  I rediscovered my voice.  Literally and figuratively.  I had to learn how to be loud, (or loud for me!), and how to speak in groups of people again.  I developed a new sense of self-confidence.  Sitting in my cube as an economic analyst, I spent most of my time isolated, writing away about things that I did not always care about.  Now, I am in front of people all the time and I like it!  This is huge because when I first decided to quit my job and begin my program I spent a night awake on a friend’s futon having a panic attack about whether I could handle it all.  But, that is when my mantra became one day at a time, and it worked!  No feat seems impossible when you look at it one day at a time.

Now, here I am, wrapping up my summer vacation, sitting on the floor of my living room, laptop out, cat in front of me, dog cooling himself from the Sacramento heat on the cool tiles of our entry, and husband lounging behind me on our couch.  I really never have been happier.  Yes, I am again nervous about what the school year will bring, (particularly since I will now be on my own instead of co-teaching), but I am also happy.  I am happy that I have a job that makes me excited, happy that I have a sweet little home and family, happy that there are so many people in my life that I love and am grateful for, (including, most likely you if you are reading this!).

Maybe it’s the juice fast that my husband has us doing, (a topic for another entry and a possible cause of my ramblings!), but I’m feeling particularly open and grateful today.  If you made it this far, thank you for taking the time to share in my spontaneous happiness manifesto.