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I Can't Get No Satisfaction

10/22/2017

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(Funnily enough, the children in my class love this song!  They rock out super hard when it's played for our end of the day dance party.)
Look, I don't mean to brag, but I was an awesome paper writer in high school and college.  I enjoy writing, and it came easily to me.  Almost regardless of the topic and the type of deadline I was working with, I could crank out a solid paper that usually earned me an A.  It was a really satisfying experience, a pretty formulaic one that followed me for many years over the course of my education.  

There are other memories of that sense satisfaction from my early adulthood; that exhilarating feeling of knowing that you've totally nailed it.  Finding an apartment in Manhattan that you can actually afford on your bakery salary?  Awesome!  Earning a role you desperately want and going on to complete a successful run?  Well done!  Go enjoy that cast party.  Getting hired by a professional company that will pay you to act?  Pinch me, I'm dreaming!  

Satisfaction looks different for me now, more than a decade down the road.  I'm a mom and a teacher.  How do you enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done when your job is never...well, done?

Take my house, for example.  I love a clean, organized, welcoming home.  I've made my peace, however,  with the knowledge that the entire house cannot be clean at the same time.  In fact, in order to have a period of time to myself in which I can clean one part of my house, I am almost certainly offering up another part of the house to be torn apart by my children who are playing.  

The same logic is true of my parenting and teaching.   I can spend a few hours of quality time with my children on the weekends, OR I can prepare a week's worth of nutritious, homemade lunches.  I can adjust our classroom's daily schedule when my students look really engaged in their play, OR we can go outside and play in nature.  I operate in a constant state of prioritizing and choosing, and I long for that linear, predictable process of writing a paper - a process that has a clear ending and clear feedback on how good a job I'm doing.  

So, how have I changed the way I look at satisfaction?  These days, it's in moments, sometimes tiny little pockets of time.  It's buying a beautiful bouquet of my favorite flowers that sit on an otherwise-cluttered countertop.   It's having a dance party in the kitchen where, for three minutes, the whole family is happy together.  It's laughing with a student as she tries, over and over, to keep a drop of watercolor from dripping down her paper.  It's running just a bit faster or longer than last time (and, barring that, just enjoying that I got out there at all).  It's making a really beautiful meal, even if it's only once a week. It's welcoming the love and beauty and joy I see in the span of sometimes just a few seconds.

Satisfaction may not carry the sense of accomplishment that it once did.  But I think my life is richer for all those satisfying little moments that I make the conscious effort to embrace. 
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