Beginning All Over Again

The new semester started this week at the University of Houston, where I teach, and yesterday I met my first class, a Master Fiction Workshop. Often, the Master Workshop is the final class that our graduate students take before they do their thesis/dissertation defense, and by this point most of them are mature writers with a draft of their novel or short story collection. This year all the students have novels, so we will also be reading, side by side, published novels that I have assigned them based on their interests and their projects. We will start with Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Hesse's Siddhartha, novels that I love for different reasons, and analyze the way in which the writers have structured chapters. Along with the students, I know I will learn a great deal from this re-examination.

I feel very fortunate to be teaching. Teaching certainly has its challenges, but there is such a sense of renewal to it. Each semester I begin all over again. Each semester I have the opportunity to touch the lives of young writers and learn from them. At the end of the semester, there is a sense of closure as I turn in grades and the students go on to the next stage of their lives. It is a unique relationship. I am very fond of my students. We have (I think!) a lot of fun together as we learn. We are in a great enterprise together, the creation of art, and through it, the examination of humanity and this amazing universe we live in. Yet at the end of the semester I can let them go without a pang--because that's the way it's supposed to be. (But often I'm surprised and delighted by students who come back--maybe years later-- to let me know of their achievements).

I wish I could achieve this equanimity in other areas of my life!

P.S. I'm very interested in how people feel about their jobs, the challenges and satisfactions. Please do write your thoughts about what you do.

Driving Lessons

One of my favorite quotes is from the movie The Journey, directed by Harish Saluja: Life Gets in the Way of Art. Every year I warn my graduate students in the Creative Writing program at the University of Houston to be prepared for unexpected busyness that will sabotage our writing. Well, humblingly, that's what has been happening to me this summer, with a son getting ready to leave for college, and another one learning to drive, and one of them joining a breakdance group, and both of them deciding to play the guitar . . . . You get the idea.

Anyway, as I've been helping my son practice driving (a character-building experience for us both), I've been musing on the similarities between being a good driver and living a spiritual life.

In Chapter 12 of the Bhagavat Gita, Krishna says, (my loose translation from the Sanskrit), "a person who does not make others anxious, nor allows anyone to cause anxiety in him, is a true devotee, dear to me." Isn't that at the heart of good driving?

How about the realization that if I hurt you, I can't escape getting hurt myself? That my good is bound up in your good? "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." (Matthew 7:12)

And when I remind my son to not go too fast on the freeway, nor too slow, and to stay in one of the lanes in the center, I'm reminded, literally, of the Buddhist practice of majjhimā paipadā, following the middle path.

I've been noticing a number of parallels between good writing practices and living the spiritual life, too. I'll discuss those another time.

Meanwhile, comments, anyone?