Daruma and the Land of Someday
Daruma is sold in a state without eyes, and it is common that the person who bought it to paint the eyes. It is understood in Japan that you should paint one eye as a wish and paint the other eye as soon the wish comes true. Basically, you should make a wish and then paint Daruma's left eye (the right side if you face it) and finally paint the right eye once the wish comes true.
Daruma's eyes are said to represent AUN. The left eye is A which means the beginning of things, and the right eye is UN which means the end of things.
taken from Artisan: JTB USA Online Store
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As I was pulling in to a slightly too small parking space near Weidmann's today, I heard the alert for an incoming email. Since I was just a few minutes early, I took the time to check what had come in. It was news I have been waiting more than twenty years to get; once again, I am a grad student.
When I was finishing my MA at Indiana, I wanted to go on to a PhD. I even spent time talking to my adviser, one of the foremost experts in our field, about it. She told me that she felt I needed some life experience before I went into the PhD to help me find the all-important question that would shape that final degree. At the time, I was really discouraged, but I also knew that she was right. While there were several aspects of second-language acquisition I found fascinating, there was nothing that I could say consumed me. I hung out with enough doctoral candidates to know that being consumed was a requirement.
Then I met the director of Aichi University's English department when he was in Bloomington on a recruiting trip, and instead of heading to at least four more years of being a student, I found myself moving to Japan to teach.
Time passed. Life changed. Japan became Meridian High School became West Lauderdale. I found that, contrary to every expectation I had ever had, teaching high school English was the thing I loved to do the most. I became adviser to clubs and teams, served as department chair, dove deeply into educational tech. Through it all, the siren song of that delayed degree continued to sing faintly.
Several times, I flirted with going back. While at Epcot on a vacation, I even bought a Japanese Daruma doll, telling my best friend that I was purchasing it specifically to fill in its eyes when I began and finished my doctorate. That lovely red and gold doll sat on my desk for a time. Eventually, I put it in my storage room where its blank gaze didn't remind me that I still hadn't made any progress toward my goal.
Teaching life is such that there is almost always a shortage of either time or money for big endeavors. I have of course known some lucky people who married spouses with vast incomes and used their own teacher paycheck as their "play money," but that's not the norm. Whenever I thought about trying to go back again for another degree, I could never figure out how to make it happen. I was stuck in the Land of Someday, that quicksand quagmire of dreams and vague plans.
It's a sneaky thing, the Land of Someday. It's not uncomfortable at all. In fact, it's warm and pleasant as pulls you in inch by inch until movement is forgotten. At least that's how it was for me. I could study what I longed for as a sweet abstract idea and never even try to reach for it. I don't know if I ever would have escaped had it not been for a giant and totally unexpected kick in the backside that woke me up.
When I found out that I had been selected as my district's Teacher of the Year and started looking through the information about the state competition, so many fabulous things were listed in the possible prizes if I were chosen. I vividly remember the leaping of my pulse, though, when I saw a scholarship for an entire degree available to the winner. It had been years since I had tried my hand at writing a scholarship essay, but here was a chance at long last to remove the barrier that single teacher finances had been.
There was also the fact that I had found something I am passionate about to carry me through what is to come. Teaching is not what I do; it is who I am. It consumes me. Right down to the cellular level, I'm a teacher. You could probably look at my tissues under a microscope and see dry-erase marker dust and red-pen ink stains on them. This new degree would allow me to learn to be better, to refine my craft so I could turn around and ensure my students are getting the best preparation I can provide them.
Over the next few weeks, I ordered transcripts, requested letters of recommendation, crafted a written philosophy, and completed all the other beginning business of such endeavors. I forced myself to be patient as the machinery of admissions clicked through its paces.
Today, with that email notification, I officially left the Land of Someday and started down a new path. Today, I got Daruma out of storage, dusted him off, and filled in his left eye. I don't know what the future is going to hold or how this will all turn out in the end, but I do know that just the act of starting this thing I have wanted for so long has been powerful for me. I feel, for lack of a better term, awake for the first time in a long time. I cannot wait to see what lies ahead, to reach this goal twenty-plus years in the making, to fill in Daruma's other eye, to take this as far as I can, to at long last perhaps be Dr. Waters.
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