I sit for a few seconds staring at my computer, watching my own
personal mission statement march across the screen, hoping I can live up to
it today.
Caring Profoundly, Enacting Community, Inspiring Inquiry, Illuminating
Possibility.
Two summers ago, in 1999, I composed these phrases
for my screensaver during a workshop on the topic of “visioning.” I don’t
recall what motivated me to give up the four June days for this topic, but I
knew I needed to re-focus after the Columbine killings. The workshop refreshed
me for the final two years, reminding me why I had walked through the door
marked Principal in the first place.
Much of the time, the stream of events,
kids, and conversations just flows forward, finding its own channel. Today,
riding that flow, I will make many more small choices than big decisions.
Choices are the infinitesimal adjustments that come from the place where my
individual disposition meets my life experiences. Fundamental to my doing of
this job, these choices, these units of inclination, are the subatomic
particles of daily decision making.
Decisions, the currency of school
leadership, are more administrative
than choices, more about the public yes/no, now/later, this/that. Choices are
the corrections, amendments, right or left turns, and adjustments in vocal tone
that I make in each of the thousand moments that make up a day. I wish I could
say that I only make good choices. Like decisions, choices not only express
ideals, knowledge, wisdom, and good intentions, but also reflect
misunderstandings, blind spots, and prejudices.
Today, will I stonewall? Will I lie to
anyone? Will I weasel to avoid doing something that I really don’t want to do?
And today, will impatience trail off into anger, my own particular defense
against the frustration that can come from never finishing anything, from
encountering one more thing I am supposed to pretend is other than what it is?
Maybe.
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