Dots

One of the first things I bought for my classroom many years ago was a poster.  It was a banner, really, broken up into three sections.   When placed together, its bright yellow letters shouted out to the reader this one very important idea:   “You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story.”  It was a logical poster, I thought, to hang above a whiteboard in an English class full of adolescents, and for many years I thought about it quite rarely.

As May days arrived, the banner came down from the wall.  The Augusts rolled on, and the banner went back up.  Each year it became more and more tattered.  I found myself pausing each new season a little longer than the last, rereading the words, reevaluating the message.

           

 “You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story.”

           

 “You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story?”

           

 Sometimes I wondered.

           

 Over the years, classrooms changed, textbooks were replaced, and the students, dozens and then hundreds, walked in and out the door.

            

"You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story” the banner told me each and every day.

             

Seriously?

            

 But still the banner went up.

            

 People in my life grew old and they died.  Relationships ended.  Friends moved away.  Vast historical forces clattered us all around like Yahtzee dice and tumbled us out onto cold kitchen tables.

“You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story.”

             

It began to sound a little trite.

            

A year ago this month I moved from the junior high, where I had taught for a dozen years, to the high school.  I packed many things into tight boxes and moved most of my stuff across the road.  The banner stayed behind.

             

When it came time to decorate my new room, some of my old posters went up on the wall.  Some of the posters I inherited joined them.  As I decorated my new room, rummaging through boxes and folders filled with over a decade’s worth of stuff, a lone piece of paper fell out onto the floor.  It was white printer paper with dozens and dozens of multicolored dots etched upon it in colored pencil.  It was vibrant in its simplicity, and it was a gift.

             

Many years before, a student had created these dots and offered them to me during an extraordinary difficult time in her life.  This individual had created this color, had brought this very simple beauty into the world when most of us would have simply stayed in bed.  To an outside observer, it must have seemed one of the grayest seasons in her relatively young life.

             

Regardless, she colored those dots.  She chose those various shades, and then she shared them.  That, to me, was a tremendous example of free will.  That piece of paper, which I have since taped onto a background of blue, greets me each morning as I walk into my classroom.  Those colors remind me that I have the privilege of deciding how I interact with the world and how I view the world, not vice versa.  Those dots often shame me when I am reminded that though I have never dealt with the kind of turmoil she survived, I am rarely as pleasant a person as she was on even her worst day.

           

 I no longer put up a banner in my room that tells readers “You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story,” because I no longer think it is true.  Certainly we get editorial input into our lives and some people take tremendous advantage of that gift, but at the end of the day, there are a multitude of literary elements we must simply accept: certain characters, particular settings, major plot developments.  If I have learned anything from my own children, however, or anything from that former student, it is that we do get to fill our pages with whatever color we want.