Contributed by Naomi Ward, MSB’s Head of Learning
‘All real living is meeting… and teaching is endless meeting’ – Martin Buber
Endless meeting.
These words feel true.
The commotion (co-motion?) of the school day: classes coming and going, a blue door swinging, scraping plastic chairs in classroom, hall, office. The meeting can feel endless – on some days joyful – on others, depleting – more likely both and everything in between.
Yet Buber’s words elevate habitual meeting towards ‘real living.’ There is something available here if we are open to it – that is real, that matters – an opening to more life.
Saki Santorelli builds on this by describing the teacher-student relationship as ‘an embodiment, a direct expression of interconnectedness and interdependence,’ where teaching is the ‘vocation of becoming a true human being.’
What if the interconnectedness of endless meeting in the context of school life, is our curriculum for becoming a true human being?
Oh dear. I realise I’ve set myself up to ask the question: ‘what is a true human being?’
I like big questions, so instead of shrinking in the shadow of the inquiry, I’ll take a small bite – why don’t you take one too?
An overused word that is rattling around this question is ‘authenticity.’ What is your relationship to the word? Does it mean being honest, speaking ‘your truth’?
Is it living in alignment with values, being in service of others, honouring your upbringing, inheritance and cultural identity? Interesting that this word shares the same root as ‘authority.’ So is this word discreetly pointing us to individualism, seeing one’s own world view first? ‘I was being my authentic self.’ Is authenticity to come from the lens of the self? To be self-ish?
Yet our experience of being a true human being is not one of fixity or knowing. Asheri writes that authenticity ‘is not straightforward but built on the shifting sands of multiple self-states in flux.’
These shifting sands are evoked in meeting. We fluctuate depending on our state and the quality of relationality between us. Think of a colleague you meet regularly. Who do you become when you are with them? How do you know? What is shifting in you? What might be shifting in them?
Is to be authentic to be in contact with shifting sands of self-state? Then to practise raising awareness beyond the thinking mind, to tune into sensation, emotional tone, the field between us, memory? Then with discernment and responsibility, to share what’s here. For example:
‘As you share more about this, there’s a tightening in my chest. There’s some fear. There’s also weariness.’
This might be data that is significant for decision-making, or it might be a fear of change that is in you. No matter for now. The sharing is authentic, undefended, a tender offer that builds relationality without reaching for meaning. It slows things down. Invites observation. Brings more of the human-ness of encounter into the field.
“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
A small bite of the question. Is part of being true as a human, to be in the motion of relating, sharing what is and to notice what this creates?
It lives underneath everything – Prologue, Story, Re:Sourcing, Interbeing, even the conversations we have, and the learning spaces we host.
A quiet assumption that growth is relational.
That wisdom is collective.
That leadership is less about performance and more about presence.
Maybe this is the real curriculum:
A way of meeting.
Again and again.
Endlessly.
Human to human.
A closing note:
We know that to be human is not to be separate. Separation comes from being right, from judgement, and this causes harm. At msb, we believe in the wisdom of ‘small is good, small is all.’ The tender practice of naming what’s true in the moment, of being consciously relational, is a gesture towards joining what has been wrongly separated.
I can’t think of anything more important for we humans to do.
