“Some ten year olds just don’t know their own power.” ~Kim Nguyen
A girl that lives in my dorm suite told me that. We were talking about what classes we were taking for the semester and she excitedly told me that she had just applied for job. I was curious to know what kind of work she wanted to do.
She told me that she had applied for a job with Teach for America. Teasingly, I told her that she must be really fond of bad kids. She laughed and told me that she was, although I wasn’t surprised. What she did say afterward, however, I found intriguing. Kim told me that she just hoped that they wouldn’t make her cry every day. A part of her was afraid that she’d be stuck in a job doing what she loved and afraid that the experience was going to be more than she could handle. “Some ten year olds just don’t know their own power,” she told me. Then why the heck would she want to do it?
I remember last semester I’d stay up countless nights angry, crying, frustrated and making myself crazy trying to get through my first calculus course because it was something that was really important to me and I just couldn’t understand why I couldn’t learn. It wasn’t the first time that I’d ever felt like that. I’d had plenty of experiences, personal and domestic, that had made me feel as if I’d been shoved into a cage and wouldn’t be free until I figured out how to get through it – that I wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but that the damage would be greater if I didn’t learn how to transcend it; but college was supposed to alleviate that right?
Not necessarily.
I just got back from my first vacation since I was 12 years old. The rest have been spent working and recently combined with taking classes or dealing with overwhelming personal battles and unable to take time to recharge, rejuvenate or ever relax. But that is the kind of world that I have always lived in. And this winter was a little bit different… I’m really hoping that it will kind of set the tone for the rest of the decade. I finally got a chance to slow down.
I did some self discovery through reading, arts and crafts. I developed an idea for a small community kitchen that teaches high school kids and college students essential sustainability practices; like canning, edible farming and how to run a local business through a cooperative. I visited local businesses in Birmingham, stayed with a working family there for about a week and realized how important it was to teach this growing segment of the population the skills needed to sustain themselves without the dependence upon parents’ incomes, governmental agencies or funding.
One thing that I noticed is that in today’s economies, some parents are downsizing and even taking on extra jobs just to be able to make ends meet and this creates a barrier to living a healthy and balanced lifestyle as well as serves as an impediment for basic needs; such as being able to eat healthy. It is very difficult to tell a single parent that they can save money by not eating out every day and cooking meals when they are working two jobs are more just to keep food on the table, and I don’t see fast food companies making any responsible measures to put healthy food on their menus.
I remember as a kid I used to be so resentful about the fact that my parents were never home and we couldn’t sit down together and eat as a family like the families did on television. I knew it wasn’t reality, but it didn’t make me want to be a part of something like that regardless. I’d been preparing my own meals since I was six – the exception being for extended family gatherings, holidays, and Friday nights at the Golden Corral. Occasionally we’d have pizza on nights when some kitchen disaster occurred that resulted in a visit to the emergency room or if I experimented to create something healthy that the family decided right off the bat they weren’t going to like. A lot of times they wouldn’t even try it, simply because they didn’t know what it was. So I would just pack it up in the fridge, eat my pizza and take it to school for lunch the next day and revel in the masterpiece. Little did they know; I had an extraordinary palate. My lack of knowledge of what was in the little jars of flakes and powders hidden within the pantry, taught me how to craft and cultivate a taste for blending flavors, vegetables and sauces; a culinary strength that serves me even to this day. And yet after working for a few years in the grueling and exciting restaurant industry, I decided that my place was not in someone else’s kitchen.
I had to learn the hard to way to know when to go at my own pace, and that was something that I’d never be able to learn had I not seen the advantages and disadvantages of both. I always pushed myself harder than everyone because I had to. Secretly I was hoping that if I just fought for it, that one day everything was going to click and I was going to come from behind and not be the underdog anymore. In some cases things did click and I always found myself at the top of my field. I was a self made woman and I felt worthless because I understood that the more I broke my back to keep what they believed I was supposed to have, the posh apartment, the clothes, the cash, I was going to continue to be completely miserable.
I was even good with money enough to be able to keep up with my lifestyle, by using a formula I had learned about not spending more than a third of my income on bills, saving a third and budgeting the remainder as my disposable income. I invested none of it and got so comfortable with the lifestyle, the fact that I was literally killing myself did not matter to me at all. Unfortunately, my diet and lifestyle were so out of balance that my nervous system gave out and one day my world came tumbling down. Each day I deteriorated more and more until one day my life collapsed and I lost everything I’d ever cared about.
All of the stuff was gone. But I hadn’t just lost the material things –which I learned wasn’t as important to me as I thought it would be. I lost my identity. I woke up one morning 70 pounds heavier, broke and living with my grandparents in a house full of unemployed unmotivated people unsure of who I was, and to this day I could never figure out how I let things get out of hand so quickly. I had invested so much of my self-worth in what I could and didn’t achieve that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I tried to take a period to just see if I liked myself that way. It had been in a sense comforting to not have to be all things to all people. But to the rest of my family it was devastating. You would have thought I’d done something to let them down, and by some of them I was treated as such.
I took a couple of years to live with family members, but as I began to grow out of my depression and burned to do more with my life, I had to take notice of the world in which I lived in from the bleaker side of the fence. We always seem to forget that world lies behind us and I had never been anyone who’d suffered that kind of misstep before. But the experience also taught me a lot about people and how people often accept setbacks and barriers as failure simply because they do not understand their own power.
Emotions that we often feel when we are living with adversity
Hopelessness
Anger
Fear
Mistrust
Complacency
often give us the information we need in order to identify not just what challenges in our lives we’ll need to actively work on in order to be able to move forward, but also where the developmental opportunities present themselves to create practical solutions for our everyday lives to make our lives easier, balanced, healthy and productive.
One of the problems I had where I worked before was that even though I was making great money, the company that I worked for demanded daily 12 hour schedules for the newer staff members and company policy for our location mandated that even though we worked in a restaurant we weren’t able to even pay full price for food without special permissions. I was living on bread and lattes until I could go to the bar after work and get something to eat, which usually wasn’t until sometime after midnight. I didn’t have a car because I lived in the city and so I almost never went grocery shopping unless I had time to walk down to the store on my one day off that I wasn’t fixing something at home or doing housework and laundry and even then I could only carry so much. And usually by that time in the week, what I really wanted was just to party and get all of the anxiousness and irritability over the week out of my system.
I never realized how important rest was, and it’s taken me years even then to understand how vital it is for me to have it. My life is still hectic, which makes it all the more disturbing for me when I can’t get it, but there have been other lifestyle changes that I’ve made that have benefited me greatly. The one thing I ran across through my studies and research that I realized was really powerful was how incredible it was for working or impoverished people to be able to have access to affordable, healthy food.
As human beings, we have “a right and an obligation to flourish” but all of us don’t always have the privilege (Danneman) to have the resources we need to live better… or so I thought.
Every time you throw out a water bottle, spit out a seed, waste the tiniest bit of clean water or stand in the sun, we are taking for granted the abundance of the world around us and the power of education to create basic needs from these things.
A Hydroponic Window Farm is a low cost, low energy hydroponic drip system that can be used to grow food in small urban apartment settings.
Ever seen one of these before?
I wish that I had seen one of these, or better yet, understood the importance of how basic resources like these and other sustainability practices that I’ve taken for granted in the past could have literally saved me a lot of headache, heartache and economic independence.
But as Kim reminded me today, “Some people just don’t know their own power.”
Interested in learning more about what you can do to make your days easier, your inner life richer, and help you improve your financial dependency by increasing your economic resilience at home? Over the next few weeks we’ll be teaching you techniques and practices that can help you learn to identify resources around you that you can use that will allow you to save yourself from your only adversary; your own self as you learn to see the world in a different light, grow through your education and your experiences and Manifest more Simplicity through these Lessons that can be found as you learn to Savor the Earth. So stay attuned…
in the meantime, you can also check out India Arie in this vid teaching her own lesson about healing in simplicity....
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