Sunday, May 27, 2018

Peeking through the curtains...

"It's not that I have something to hide,
I just have nothing I want you to see."
– Andres Niccol screenwriter,
movie – Anon: Spoken by
Amanda Seyfried


I didn’t want to admit it. In fact, I thought I’d left all that behind. It’s one of those things you imagine that changing times and circumstances would cause it to drift away into the currents of yesteryear. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

I guess it’s true, everything you have done in life is recorded somewhere in the memory banks, and if that ‘doing’ involved other people, well, you just have to deal with the consequences.

I might as well just come out and say it. If confession is truly good for the soul, then here goes.

I am a voyeur plain and simple. If I were sincere, I'd have to say I am surprised how exciting it is. In the early years, surprisingly, I didn't find it nearly as stimulating.

In those times, I have to admit, the motivation was truly questionable. But everyone I knew, at least in the circle of folks with whom I ran, was doing it. I realized some of them genuinely loved it. Their eyes would sparkle when talking about their latest foray or adventure. It wasn't that way for me. I was just going along with the crowd.

My life was a little aimless at the time, and due to circumstances, it was the thing to do. If I hadn't done it, I would have been discarded by all of them, and left to fend for myself, alone…un-needed.

I suppose it would be important to say how I found myself in this current circumstance. I want to be clear, I did it willfully…no coercion, no calls from old friends from bygone days encouraging me to give it a go. The full gravity of this thing and its repercussions are on my shoulders and mine alone.

I think what made me start up again were fond memories that I now realize were not wholly realistic. Our minds do that, you know. As the years go by and the hard edges of life and past experience become softened, the explicit memories give way to a broader sense of past events.

That led to this…
So, it was that in February, after going through a six-month vetting process, I got a teaching position in the Department of Biology this fall at the local junior college – an anatomy/physiology (A&P) course to prepare future health care professionals (e.g., nurses, EMTs, physical therapists).

Oh, you thought I meant I had been peeking through windows at the local sorority or neighbor's houses. I'm sorry, I meant to say decades ago while finishing school and teaching, I was spending a lot of time ‘looking into' how our physical body's work. The gang of folks I ran with in those days were graduate and later, faculty colleagues.

In that time, there was so much to learn and no time to think about it. In school, it was ‘burn the midnight oil' to pass the test – next! In the first year of teaching,  I was barely two weeks ahead of my students!

In the fall, I’m taking on the physiology side of ‘A&P.' The reality check came pretty quickly. The warm and fuzzy feelings of classroom days gone by were quickly replaced by the sheer volume and scope of material to be taught. An undercurrent of fear began to ooze its way from a low-level discomfort to a more blatant, "What the heck were you thinking?!"

To prepare, I got the texts, a new colleague's old class notes, and collateral materials (i.e., PowerPoint presentations and a sample syllabus). The textbooks, by the way, are huge, hefty and very expensive…further, I might add, pretty content dense.

At first, I was so overwhelmed, I put the books on my desk, stored the electronic materials on my computer, sat down and just looked them. That little voice seemed a bit stronger...not "...what the heck, but WHAT THE HELL??"

The first section? The endocrine system (hormones).

At first, it was tough sledding, my brain rusty and apparently not particularly interested in getting with the program.

But as the pages unfolded and the notecards began to fill up, something inside started to change. I stopped resisting the mass of material and felt myself embracing it. It would be disingenuous to say every metabolic control and feedback loop excited me, but on balance, I began to look forward to the ways in which these seemingly disconnected hormone glands create an orchestral balance so finely tuned and elegant it’s almost breath taking.

Like Goldilocks and the three bears…too much of something gets turned down…too little, turned up…all regulated like an automatic thermostat connected to the furnace or cooling system keeping the temperature "...just right…” The medical term – homeostasis.

By now, I have worked through the hormones and Blood. An aside: Do you know each red blood cell contains over a two hundred seventy-three million oxygen binding sites, AND there are between twenty to thirty billion red blood cells in our bodies? How could you NOT be excited!! I know, I digress and need to calm down...

Next is the heart and circulation

There is a lot to review, you know to keep ahead of my students this fall, but the more I'm in the physiology, the more wondrous it has become. This time around, the material is not without a frame of reference or context. This time around there is space to meditate on the way this body interacts. Understanding it, as much as I am capable, has become fun and intriguing (if I may use that word).

Yep, this time around, peeking through the physiology and metabolic curtains of life is pretty darn rewarding.

An old high school classmate sent me a quote of encouragement from Lucius Seneca (a Roman philosopher) – "While we teach, we learn…"

Hard to argue…

- ted


2 comments: