The frustrating experiences that linger with me the longest are the times I was able to make a difference in my tiny corner of the world or have some kind of effect or even have the potential to have an effect, and then it was derailed, often by a well-meaning person whose perception of their abilities might have been greater than the reality.
I have a far easier time coping with my own mistakes and inane decisions than watching someone else decimate my efforts. Maybe it's because I have more faith in myself to correct my own path than I have in others who seem more willing to let things fall to the wayside.
This is just a personal rant as I try to work on disattachment from it all. I have some regrets, but when someone takes over a project, from a small task to a political portfolio, it's somehow still ours to mourn or celebrate despite not having any agency to affect it.
For years I had my entire school composting food waste. I set up buckets and bins in many convenient places throughout the school and kept my promise to the head custodian that they would all be emptied and cleaned by the end of the day. It just took 30 minutes each night for me to dump each bin into a giant wheeled container that lived outside and to wipe them all down with vinegar as I went. I arranged for the city to pick up our big bins, and it all ran smoothly. Then a VP took over student activities and wanted to take over that as well explicitly because he felt badly about how many coffee cups he tossed each day. He liked that they could be "green binned" instead (although they never should be composted, and that's not really compost anymore, but that's a story for another day). The VP put it in student hands and never checked up on it. The bins stopped being emptied. The head custodian rightly took them away. The city started calling me because the giant bins were all empty, and I directed them to the VP, but they never connected. I offered to help, but the VP seemed insulted by the offer and insisted he was on top of it all but doing it his own way. Trust me. And I watched it all fall apart.
I also continued a very long tradition of collecting for charity in my school. We laminated some homemade posters taped in a few places where we could easily indicate the monthly charity of choice. Our school was one of the most charitable in the region for a very long time - like, decades. Then just one student wanted to improve the system with professionally made posters behind glass. Her overt intention was to make our charity the most amazing thing possible. She took down our posters - the work of many students in a club I had been working with for years - in wait for the new and improved posters - the good ones instead of the shit we had apparently been using for years. Collections stopped happening. Issues around layout and costs and who was paying for them meant the posters never arrived. It took almost an entire school year for her to realize that her dream -- her goal of personally stamping her own name in the school before graduation -- wasn't going to become reality. By then, the rhythm of collections was lost. No posters went up, and we never seemed to regain the original energy of the program. The entire decades-long charity collection ended because of one student's hubris. It took so much to build and so little to destroy.
Then in July 2022, I worked with an amazing group of people to put together a website with a clear and well-organized collection of peer-reviewed studies explaining Covid, each briefly summarized in layman's terms and linked indicating the publication and date. It was a full week of solitary work, a good 16 hours/day for a solid 7 days. I gave up time campaigning for trustee in order to launch the website by August 1st. The idea was to get no bullshit information out about Covid to the general public before school started that year. I worked with people one-on-one to come to satisfactory solutions to any issue that arose. Then, when it was ready to launch, just one person wanted to fix up a few things to make the wording absolutely perfect before putting it out there, and then continued to fix it up well into the school year. It never got launched, and it was painful to watch that fall apart. I considered taking everyone else's name off and just launching the information myself, leaving them to launch their more perfect version later, but the links and summaries I had written had been completely deleted by then. That. Was. Brutal. Other people have since created excellent websites of information, but the timing was perfect for ours: right after masks had unceremoniously been removed, and when many people were still unsure if they should mask in class or not for the coming school year. It was an absolutely vital moment to share clear information about how the virus spreads, what it does to the body, and how to prevent getting it. And we missed it. Ouch.
These episodes all came flooding back to me this week when I got a notification to update payment for a website for the Charlie Awards Film Festival. This decades-old student festival was floundering when my son won it in 2014, so I stepped in to revitalize it and get it back to its former glory. My son and I spent an entire summer scouring the region for the original films dating back to 1972 in order to catalogue them on a website, most needing to be uploaded online, some from VHS tapes. I wanted to keep it going at least to it's 50th year. But in year 49 we were in work-to-rule (no extracurriculars allowed), and by January I had to call it, and decided to postpone for a year in case the strike position wasn't resolved by April 2020. Yup. Just in time for lockdown!!
By the time it felt reasonable to bring the festival back, I was retiring and left it in capable hands. I gave complete access to the website, which I had paid ten years in advance, and where all the schools knew to access, but they decided to make a new website instead (which goes to a "get this domain" page if you don't type /home - and which clearly hasn't been updated since 2023). I left a clear timeline around when to start calling for submissions, securing judges, sponsors, and a venue, and arranging the advertising in a variety of places, and I'm not sure how much any of that was followed. We went from a handful of people in the audience in 2014 to a full house in a few years, but now it appears to have been left for dead. It's definitely partly due to Covid, but why completely redo the website, indicating that it's a work in progress, when there's a perfectly good one already up, fully accessible, and paid for?? Why start from scratch instead of building on what's already been successful?? I just don't get it, and it's sometimes hard to let it all go. And the teacher who took it over, typically extremely competent, also ran the yearbook, and told me she set aside a page for my retirement, then not only didn't ever create that page, but left out my picture entirely as well as my daughter's. What a clusterfuck!! And what a shitty final reminder of my 31-year career. But anyway...
It's so curious to me when people want to take something that's working and make it their own in a way that undoes some of the collective work already started by others. Instead of building on previous work, it seems like the drive to call-it-your-own requires some unceremonious destruction or negligence of prior efforts.
When I retired, I left all my lessons and assessments for my courses behind, and I was surprised how little concern I had whether or not any of that got used by the new teachers. The only thing I regret not saving from my teaching days was a comprehensive grammar guide I had put together over the years with funny examples and links to exercises. I'm not even sure what I'd use it for except just to share it for other to use. Nobody could teach my courses the way I taught them because I brought so many ideas and examples and analogies that couldn't possibly be used in the same way by any other person. Teaching in the humanities can be a very personal endeavour. But these other things, these tasks like composting, collecting for charities, organizing information, and running a festival, could be followed and built upon instead of being completely overhauled in a way that might usher in their demise.
I'm letting the fees lapse for the underused website this month and having some feelings about that. I know it all turns to dust in the end anyway, but it didn't need to go quite so soon. My practice of intentional disattachment is presenting quite a challenge for me today!! It's a good starter point for preparing for the loss of the greenbelt, which is also looming heavily over me despite having nothing to do with me personally. I don't write about it much because it's way too painful, but these things have a way of piggybacking on each other. Something trips one emotional trigger, and anything similar rears its head in a cascade, then they all get mixed together until you're not even sure which is the cause and which is the effect. Maybe it's just easier to complain about personal issues. Once the greenbelt's gone, it's gone, irreparable.
Irreplaceable.
I think we all hope we can build something that other people will make use of -- if not a leave-behind after we're gone, at least something that was appreciated instead of trashed and remodelled with an unachievable ambition. We all want to be useful in this world, amIright?!? But augmenting what was there, what took years to achieve, and honouring the efforts of those who laid the foundations is the goal of progress. Paving it over is something else entirely.
The disattachment goal is to do things and then be done with them. As we watch so much that seems to go to ruin these days from inept political decisions, it feels harder to let go of attachments to these little things. And they are little things. It's a bit of a scramble for control in an increasingly absurd system.
Saving a few pieces here for posterity!! It was just so much work to collect the films. They're mainly all still on my YouTube channel, but not nearly as pretty as this (thumbnails of the top three winners from each year starting in 2019 that would click to play the video):
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