Self-Care in the New Year

At age 22, armed with a liberal arts degree and far more enthusiasm than worldliness, I began my education career at a boys’ boarding school. I lived in a dorm with juniors and seniors, some of whom were scarcely more than two years younger than I, and my first year was shot through with needed instruction on how to teach, grade, supervise, relate, coach, advise, and plan. There were days when I felt very lost, and I myself certainly had more to learn than anyone that I tried to teach or coach. The lessons came daily, intentionally and carefully, from veteran teachers and staffers, and gradually I became less obviously callow and a touch more useful to the school. 

For all the deliberate mentoring I received, however, it was the indirect example of a colleague that has most vividly stayed with me for over two decades. One of my fellow first-year faculty members struggled as much as I did to keep up with all the obligations—planning lessons and practices, chaperoning dances and field trips, driving students to train and bus stations, maintaining harmony and health among dorm residents—and he always looked exhausted. But even as he labored to grade papers and make his Saturday morning breakfast duty, my friend managed to find time virtually every night to polish his shoes.

Initially, this commitment struck me as incongruous with the rest of my buddy’s reality. His style of dress was somewhere between “rumpled” and “rugged,” and mirror-shined shoes didn’t appear a necessary part of the ensemble. And, of course, for someone who evidently needed both more sleep and more time to prepare for class, the notion of spending 15 minutes nightly on shoe care seemed to me a bit misplaced. At lunch one day, I gently teased my bleary-eyed colleague and wondered why he prioritized as he did.

He smiled wryly, and noted that he sometimes wondered the same thing. Then he explained how he liked to show the boys in his classes and our dorm that it was important to take pride in small things—and also to remind them that not every member of the school community had a pair of replacement dress shoes at the ready. As thoughtful as these reasons were, it was his final grinning admission that grabbed my attention: “Mostly, I do it for me.” My friend explained that while he certainly wanted to show boys the power of good habits and support awareness of socioeconomic differences, sitting down to polish his shoes every night was for him a profoundly settling act, one which brought a needed measure of calm amidst all the stress that came from learning a new profession and looking after a dorm full of boys. This calm, he believed, actually rendered my colleague more efficient and more competent in his work than he would have been had he tried to shoehorn an additional 15 minutes of grading and planning into his evening routine. (He is still an effective and beloved teacher today, so I suspect he may have been on to something.)

I write and speak often about the indispensability of ritual in terms of building and sustaining community, but we shouldn’t neglect the importance of ritual to the nourishment of the self as well. There are necessary, instrumental tasks that we all perform each day to fulfill obligations to our vocations, nurture the solidity of our relationships, and maintain our physical fitness. But we can also make sacred something decidedly non-instrumental, a thing regularly done simply because it tidies our mood, settles our rhythm, and resets our spirit. For many, this takes the form of prayer or meditation or deep reasoning—indeed, the resemblance to Stoicism, Buddhism, and other spiritual and philosophical traditions is notable—but it can be virtually anything that absorbs us and brings our life into greater harmony. Admiral William McRaven sees virtue in making one’s bed each morning; Immanuel Kant famously took a walk at the same time every afternoon; Toni Morrison made it a point to watch the sun rise on a daily basis.  

None of these activities, or a host of others—walking a dog, writing in a journal, playing a daily game of chess—are meant to be “productive;” rather, these are just small, good things that can recalibrate our senses of time and provide balms against the bumps and hurts of an uncertain world. As we move into our New Year amidst this interminable pandemic and the constellation of challenges it presents, I hope that we will all allow ourselves permission on a daily basis to take some time and shine our shoes, for big purposes, great meaning, and personal peace can inhere in such seemingly small commitments. 

I wish everyone a wonderful Winter Break, and look forward to seeing you in 2022!