One of my favorite current television shows is "Community." There are a lot of things I love about it, but as is the case with so many other shows or movies or books that really work, it comes down to the characters. Last night's episode had one of the characters, Abed, creating what he called "The Crazy Quilt of Destiny," a project he'd been working on for a long time based on some unusual and slightly invasive forms of research into the lives of his friends which revealed they had all crossed paths in life before coming together as the group they were in college. Since he's kind of a pop culture fanatic, he referred to this as discovering their origin stories. Oddly enough, not long after watching that episode I had a Facebook comment on my Day 2 post referring to my Day 1 post in which I discovered that someone I've taught with for a few years now actually student taught at the same school I did at the very same time, even with the same university advisor. If you read it, you might remember that same Day 1 post had a title that made a reference to origin stories as well. Yeah, I know. Kind of weird.
The strange thing about this discovery for me was after watching that episode of "Community," I had been idly wondering that evening how many of the people I work with at school might have previous connections from times in their -- or our -- lives that happened before we came together as a group. I know of a few of my own: The first day I showed up at school to move into my first classroom, I discovered that a former college classmate of mine was teaching in the classroom right across the hall. Not many years after that, another college classmate turned up on our staff, and it wasn't until we had become good friends that we pieced our timelines together to realize we'd been in school at the same time. Years later another woman joined our staff with a familiar last name; it turned out that I had just recently completed my Masters program while working with her mother-in-law in the same cohort group. Just in the past few years another person showed up who remembered me from some science staff development session where I had presented what amounted to a glorified slide show I'd created to introduce a project.
Maybe its the writer part of me, but I tend to see a life as an ongoing narrative instead of a just an accidental chain of events. It makes me wonder a lot about all of the formative events and the decisions that go into a person finding themselves on the path they're on. If someone grew up just outside of Chicago, what would inspire them to attend a college in the middle of Farm Country, Minnesota, which would eventually lead to an adult life in the Cities? What was the first moment of curiosity that could get a person wrapped up in a complex subculture of festivals and parades? How does someone go from a kid only bothering to attend school to be eligible for the football team to being a dedicated teacher in a life half a continent away? How different would somebody's life be if she were tall enough to reach the champagne bottle on the top store shelf and wouldn't have to ask her future husband for help getting it down?
It fascinates me to think about how some of the most important moments of our narratives came to be out of such incidental moments. I never would have imagined the possibility that one of the women I was student teaching with would eventually become one of my colleagues; I was more concerned about surviving the experience then, and it's very possible that my insecurity had me seeing her as my competition and wondering how I'd measure up against her in the job market. The day I presented my slide show, my mental energy was much more invested in (a) trying to size up my new instructional coach, who I had only met hours before, (b) trying not to look like a tongue-twisted moron in front of a room full of other teachers, and (c) making sure I didn't ramble on because my few minutes came up toward the end of the day and our meeting was being held in a conference room only slightly larger than the tent-trailer my family camped in when I was younger. The idea that one of the people listening to me would become an important part of my daily life never would have crossed my mind. And when I was traveling through Ohio on the way to a Boy Scout Jamboree in the summer of 1981, it sure as hell would have surprised me to know that somewhere in that same state my future teaching partner was probably just starting to figure out how to roll over on her own.
It's a lot to think about when you take a moment to consider all of the people who have come and gone through your life, and the chain of decisions and successes and mistakes that have led you into being the person you are. With a semi-important birthday on the horizon, I find myself thinking about this kind of stuff a little more than usual. How did I wind up here? How did I become who I am? And what should I credit the most -- the successes, the mistakes, or the things I either decided to pursue or shied away from? And who are the people I'm barely aware of now who are still destined to become major characters in my narrative further on up the road?
