I’m doing that thing where I write half a sentence and then erase it. I get so mad at my students for doing this. Ironically, the sentence I just wrote is the first one I didn’t erase. Perhaps honesty really is the best policy.
It feels rusty. I am a teacher. I teach high school English. I’ve taught other things in the past in other places: music in South Carolina, Spanish in New York, English as a second language as a Peace Corps volunteer in Panamá. This year is my ninth year of teaching in total, and 2020 has to be the weirdest year of all.
I am teaching my class outside today because it’s nice out. We’ve been advised that it’s healthier and “best practice” to take kids outside whenever we can; the virus doesn’t spread as much in the fresh air. I think often of why I haven’t been doing this all along, even before the pandemic. My students are happy to be outside. They work together on rewriting a conversation between two characters in The Iliad, and if they choose, they can act it out on Friday in our next class. Two of my girls have chosen to give Andromache, the wise and noble wife of Hector, a Valley Girl voice. I wonder if Homer could have predicted that one. My students make me laugh; at least they’re enjoying it. I still can’t believe they’re in school to enjoy it.
The principal comes up to me while we’re outside and says that one of my students is out because he has a cough and sore throat. He will get a COVID test. God, it’s beautiful outside; inside is all cleaning spray and wipes and hand sanitizer and Chromebooks and outside is all late-summer sun and grass and clouds and open space.
Why have we come to live indoors as much as we do? There are the obvious, basic answers, such as insulation from the elements, protection from predators, privacy from other humans, etc. More disturbingly, we have retreated to the indoors because of the frivolous answers that mostly have to do with increasing comfort, which is what I interpret to be a general shutting out of nature. In fact, it’s evident in our actions that we, as humans, view ourselves as wholly separate from nature, relating to it externally as something to be enjoyed, observed, or feared. We forget to meditate on the fact that our bodies are made of some of the same elements that make up trees, ants, water, and stars: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. And this denial, this shutting out of nature, does not come without its costs.
These days, living indoors seems like so much work. First, it creates the necessity to clean. As Edward Abbey duly notes in his memoir, Desert Solitaire, dust doesn’t collect outdoors, and there’s no need to sweep or mop the bare ground. Furthermore, our own structures of safety are now playing a part in endangering our health, not just in terms of the current pandemic, but also in regards to obesity, depression, anxiety, vitamin D deficiencies. The list of afflictions upon our species caused by simply living indoors is long and ever-growing.
When my husband and I lived in our small village in Panamá, one of the aspects of our lives there that we settled into--and have lost since our return--is a certain open-air quality to living. We were one step closer to healing that artificial separation between humans and nature. Most houses in rural Panamá have spaces between the walls and roof which allow the outside to enter in: fresh air, along with bats and bugs and all other kinds of exciting creatures. The wooden windows didn’t have screens; they opened right into the jungle air. Stored things didn’t last very long because mold or ants or termites would consume what stayed idle or unused, forcing us to be minimalists.
Suffice it to say, humanity and our habits have been on my mind this year. I have been reading a lot of literature lately which concern the history of our species, homo sapiens; namely, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari and Underland by Robert McFarlane. Both books have a big-history, macro-thinking feel to them, and I find myself cultivating this kind of mindset as an antidote to the selfish, comfort-seeking micro-perspectives that pervade my world-view from all sides.
My students sense it--they crave the outdoors and they often beg to go. I suspect that what they really crave is to feel human, and to discover what that even means. They crave connection with something more real to them than carpet and plastic chairs and the pledge of allegiance. So many of us have forgotten to even ask these questions because we have become so caught up in what an old college professor of mine called: “the vast machine.” I am compelled to resist it and retain what I know to be true, good, and real.
