Snickerdoodle Resilience
A letter to the YIHS Community
Miss Nelson, our 93-year old widowed neighbor, knows how to survive troubled times. We love visiting her on our family walks down the road. But, with “safer at home” and the possibility that spending time with our beloved, vulnerable neighbor could be lethal, we told our kids — who are 8, 6, and 2 — that we could wave, but not go in.
Our kids look forward to these visits for reasons both noble and ignoble: it’s a big adventure to ride or scoot the curvy county road, around the craggy rock outcropping and beyond the view of home. And Miss Nelson always gives us cookies, lots of cookies. She keeps a giant tote of snickerdoodles on hand at all times and is over-the-top generous with them. For our family, socially distancing first hit home when we realized there’d be no snickerdoodles from Miss Nelson.
After a week of being cloistered in the house, though, we reached a fever pitch and needed to get out. Our little clown parade of scooters, striders, and My Little Pony themed bikes rounded the corner. When we saw Miss Nelson’s house, we reminded the kids to just wave. As we got closer, we saw her outline in the window of the place she has lived in her whole life. She wore a big smile and a sensible pastel sweater and beckoned us over. We cautiously gave permission to approach, the image of epidemiological curves and percentages of death rates rattling in our minds. Miss Nelson just smiled, propped open the window, and passed the kids handfuls of snickerdoodles.
In this strange world-historic moment we have a lot to learn from people like Miss Nelson: A women who’s raised a family, raised animals, survived the death of almost everyone she’s ever known, and still doggedly (in the face of doctor’s recommendations, I’m sure) eats lots of cookies, drinks instant coffee, and has an avowed dislike of the taste of water. Miss Nelson knows we’re not supposed to touch; she’s adapting quickly to the unprecedented conditions, yet she’s not giving up what gives her life meaning and joy. She, for me, is an exemplar of resilience, a virtue we’re now collectively being called to understand.
What is resilience exactly? Overcoming difficulties, making omelets with broken eggs, squeezing lemonade from lemons, turning isolation into snickerdoodles — resilience is what you do with the crappy content of life. Think of rubber: think of all that the soles of your sneakers do for you on every stride that you pound them into unforgiving asphalt; they bounce back, buffer the pain, and make you believe that jogging is actually fun. Rubber is resilient; it deals with difficulty yet doesn’t loose its essential form and springy spirit.
Hence, as I see it, resilience is rapid adaptability coupled with stubborn resistance.
Resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic — at least for us not directly suffering with the illness — means changing all routines on the dime, letting go of hopes and expectations, and adapting to the new normal. Boy has the world given us a lot of crappy content to work with! Shelter in place, non-essential business closures, school at home, events canceled, together time with people you might not want to be together with. It sucks to have our sense of stability obliterated, to have what we thought was solid reality crack before our eyes, revealing a fragile collective fiction.
I’m not super proud of my own response to this pandemic. I am clinging desperately to my work as a teacher to maintain a sense of normalcy. Put in a more generous light, I’m committed to connecting with my students and providing inspiring education in a time of great need. Does this make me resilient? Maybe. But honestly, I don’t know what else I would do. On a daily basis I’ve been eschewing governmental orders and coming to my office at school to work in the mornings. Working at home is a shift that I’m not willing to make…not yet. I need (or think I need) to stubbornly stick with my go-to-work habit to be able to be hold up, to be a good father and husband and friend and teacher. This is my story, and I’m sticking to it. Gosh, I almost broke over the “weekend” when I didn’t leave the house for two consecutive days. So if I am exhibiting resilience, it’s mixed heavily with fragility.
And I’m super fortunate. I have a job, a partner who deftly leads the home-schooling, a big refrigerator. Still, despite my unique comforts, I think I’m experiencing a shared reality: clinging to a semblance of normalcy, even if it’s a fiction, provides a foundation to one’s existence.
As a school I see Youth Initiative balancing these two faces of resilience: the quick-change and the true-to-form. We’ve dropped our schedule that was carefully crafted over a year’s time and created a new one in less than a week. We saw the writing on the wall and called school before the Governor. We’ve let go of a Coffee Haus, a Festival Day, a Potluck of Ideas, a Reflection Day, Senior Project public presentations, and more. Teens have cried, parents have moaned, teachers have lost sleep and gained grey hair. It’s been heartbreaking and really really disappointing. Yet, we’ve made these monumental shifts together, with a minimum of complaining and little to no divisiveness. We are still a school. In the face of hysteria we are holding onto our sense of purpose and reaffirming what makes us “Youth Initiative.”
What are these snickerdoodles of meaning that YIHS is resiliently defending against the onslaught of uncertainty and chaos? Paradoxically, human connection. Our first goal as a Faculty has been to maintain the multiple meaningful relationships that the school fosters, between students and teachers and students and peers. Not seeing each other in real space and time makes this unbelievably hard, but we’re discovering new ways to connect via the internet, the phone, and the postal service. Secondly, we care deeply, as we always have, about well-roundedness and balance in the students’ life. Without the school schedule artifice, this has truly become a collective effort, each to their own home life. By encouraging and tracking students’ outside time, meditation, creative expressions, along with their academic work we’re providing the basis of inner wellness — much needed in the midst of a pandemic. And third, we want our students to feel and be “response-able,” able to be of service to their families and the greater world. What direct service looks like is an evolving matter, of course, but we’re not giving up on it, as the needs all around us are so great.
So we change and we stay true. We practice resilience.
In this time of immense, nearly daily upheavals that are forcing us to live in ways we’d never expected, change is constant, almost banal. What feels like the true test of resilience now is resisting change; identifying what you love about life and holding to it dearly. We all need to protect what is precious, each to their own and together, so we can get through this period not only safe, but strong.
May we open the window to change, but keep our hand in the tote of snickerdoodles!
In it,
Shawn Lavoie
YIHS Faculty & Advisor
PS Soon after this story was published, Miss Nelson passed away. She was brought to the hospital on Good Friday and died on Easter Sunday. Our hearts go out to her family as we honor the many moments in the last few years that we shared some sweetness with her.