The Direction of Intention

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When Tom was a young man he became a teacher because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Becoming a teacher, to Tom, looked like a default, a door opened and he stepped through it because no other doors were opening. Everyone who knew Tom knew he was born to be a teacher. They saw the door opening as the natural opportunity that comes along when the candidate is ready to step through the threshold and meet their destiny. They saw it as his life path.

Destiny often feels like a default until you get down the road a ways and can look backwards. A little distance is useful for meaning making.

Tom had a long career as an educator, much of it looked like a theatre program and in the last phase he wore an administrator’s mantel. When he looks back he doesn’t much think about the administration or the theatre as the most significant moments – though everyone who knows him would say those seemed to be the most impactful years of his working life, a fulfillment of his destiny. To Tom, they were good years full of great work – yet his destiny was something he might have lived but might not have found.

When he is alone and thinks of his great work he revisits a class of 4^th graders during the early years of his career. He would tell you that he didn’t know what he was doing so they went on adventures, real and imagined. He talks about the shrunken head he pulled out of his desk one day and told the kids of being taken hostage by a tribe of people in the rainforest. They spent the next several weeks retracing the steps of the ill-fated expedition: maps were made, supplies were considered, tribes were discovered and described – and that’s how the students learned about the rainforest; they had meaningful discussions about culture, geography, survival, destiny and fate. I was with Tom when, 40 years later, a student from that class, now a teacher herself, recounted in vivid detail the tale of the shrunken head and the journey that followed.

Tom told me that he was never more powerful than in those years when he believed that he did not know what he was doing. In the absence of knowing he was forced to engage; relationship was his only other option. And, as it turned out, that was a great lesson: relationship is the center of true power; knowledge is often the center of power-over-others. A happy accident or destiny? I’m not sure I know the difference anymore.

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