A decade ago, I was traveling through South Africa when a new friend shared with me how, in his native, Shona culture, strangers, new acquaintances and old buddies all greeted each other with the same, warm "How's your family?" He, too, found the American counterpart, of "What do YOU do?", difficult to connect with. To assume that a one-word reply, such as "I'm a shoe salesman" or "I'm a nanny," could ever sum up the whole of one human being's life is myopic, to say the least. Nonetheless, we keep asking because it's what we do. We want to know how we each choose to spend upwards of two-thousand hours of our time every year. Eight hours a day, forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks spent flushing someone else's waste, peering into someone else's body, teaching someone else's kids, investing someone else's money, singing someone else's song.
(Wow! That IS a lot of time.)
"What DO YOU do?"
So, we assign a value and, in some cases, a judgment to the responses we receive. With these, we create mental images of who this person is.
"Oh, he's just the caterer," my class'ist mind once chirped out after I realized that the handsome man I had just walked by - and shared a metaphorical earthquake with - was not a guest at the wedding but was, rather, working the wedding. Ironically, it took me that very moment to realize that I was not as open-minded as I had believed myself to be.
As for me, my usual response comes with a quick retort, "I live."
(What ELSE is there to do?)
Nonetheless, I thought I would point to another one of my heroes along this journey, that we nonchalantly refer to as 'life,' whose model I aspire toward. She heavily influenced the beginning of my graduate school career. She's black, bold and beautiful. She's bell hooks, celebrated author, as well as Gloria Watkins, distinguished professor, and she isn't afraid to tell it like it is. Yet, love is always her motivating impetus. Whether it is espousing upon feminist theory, ruminating on the role of post-modern art, discussing blackness within the "White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy", or writing children's books, she's an interdisciplinary artist after my own heart. An inspired intellectual, she believes in "education as the practice of freedom," just as Paolo Freire, the Brazilian sage, taught during the mid-twentieth century.
As for freedom... that delicate balance of discipline and improvisation, of work and play, of containment and creativity...
it's here.
Now.
"I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created." --bell hooks
