This past weekend, I attended a Fresh Air Conference in New York City. We stayed at a fancy hotel and ate fancy food and watched the fancy Olympics and went to a fancy nightclub and used fancy little bars of soap and rode in fancy elevators.

It was nice.

But after three days of sitting in conferences, milling around the city, eating, eating, and more eating, and spending hours on plans, trains, and metros, I was done. I missed my ordinary existence. I missed making stuff. After awhile I started to feel numb. I was slowly turning into a blob.

There were only a couple times I felt truly alive.

1. At the nightclub, I pulled out my camera and started fiddling with the settings, trying to figure out how to capture the opulent darkness. For a few minutes I was absorbed in what I was doing. It felt good.

Actually, that’s the only time I can think of. There were many enjoyable moments—listening to stories, good conversations, figuring out the art of train travel (trains are awesome)—but there was only that one time that I got deeply absorbed in doing something.

Is this odd?

I don’t consider myself a busy do-do-do person. I have no trouble putting my feet up and being waited on. I’m quite fond of sitting on my arse.

But I need a creative outlet: writing, cooking, making lists, scheming. My much-loved non-productive times are normally measured in hours, not days. And I like my independence; tourism, public transportation, and conference attending are all about being dependent. Or at least they involve a different sort of independent.

On the train ride home, my friend commented that she doesn’t know anyone else who dreads travel as much as I do. It doesn’t matter where I’m going or how much I want to go, for days in advance, I get depressed and sluggish and cranky. It’s like there’s a dread weight pressing in on me, a dark cloud at the end of the tunnel.

My friend, on the other hand (and everyone else I know), looks forward to trips. She savors the planning and anticipation. I think she’s nuts. She thinks I’m weird.

Do I just not transition well? This could be it, I suppose. Come to think of it, I dread most things. I dread hosting and appointments and busy days. Once I’m out and about (or the guests have arrived and the event has started), I enjoy myself completely. I get a rush from the activity and love the settling-back-into-my-life tired feeling that I get at the end. The accomplishment of Having Done feels good. But I don’t look forward to events. (Unless it’s something really different, like auditioning for a play or teaching a class or going out all by myself for a morning of writing. But then again, those are creative outlets.)

What about you? Do you dread trips and events and anything that requires you to shift gears and go out? To be contented, do you require the constant pressure of creating?

Humans are rather fond of moralizing lifestyle choices. We proclaim we do things because it is The Right Thing To Do. We have one car because we want to minimize our environmental footprint, say. Or we cook from scratch because it is healthier. We volunteer at soup kitchens because Jesus told us to. We save money because it’s smart and responsible. We homeschool our children because learning happens best at home. Or maybe we send our kids to school because it’s our social responsibility to mingle with the masses.

Our reasons for doing what we do are usually pretty good. Sometimes our reasons are even noble. But I don’t think the reasons we give are the primary reason. I think we do what we do because of something much more basic: it’s what we want.

Think about it: there are a plethora of good lifestyle choices out there. It’s impossible to do them all. So we pick and choose how we live our lives based on our interests, gifts, challenges, experiences, and opportunities and then we slap on the moral rationale to make ourselves feel good.

Problem is, our rationales are riddled with inconsistencies. We grow our own food to save on the environment but then invest in jugs of the best oils shipped from the Mediterranean. Or we tithe the requisite ten percent and ladle soup into bowls once a month but then buy a fancy new car for the same amount that it would cost to outfit a mini metropolis with running water. Or we encourage our children to be themselves but then lash judgement on other people when their perspectives don’t match ours.

No matter how much we’d like to think otherwise, not a one of us has the moral high ground.

Last week I had a meeting with the Sunday school committee. We huddled around a table in a chilly room at church, talking about how we might go about wrapping up the last Sunday in our series on education (which isn’t till the end of the month). Should we bring in more speakers? Introduce another perspective?

“What if we’d just have a response time?” I suggested through chattering teeth. “We could give people a chance to share what they’ve heard over the whole series. You know, what’s challenged them, what hasn’t made sense, what they appreciated…”

I trailed off, uncertain. Open-ended sharing wasn’t exactly the style of this particular class.

Personal sharing was a good idea, the group agreed, but, they wondered, what was the point of undergoing the education series? How did the ideas about education that were raised in the Sunday school class “inform our interactions with the world?”

Which left me scratching my head because whatever happened to storytelling for the sake of simply understanding each other? Must all our experiences and ideas be proven and proclaimed? If someone finds something that works for her, does that mean that everybody else’s methods are failing? Can’t there be more than one right way to do education?

Were we trying to build some sort of staircase to the moral high ground through a carefully crafted summary?

“If the you of five years ago doesn’t consider the you of today a heretic, then you are not growing spiritually,” said Thomas Merton.

The me of five years ago would be surprised by some of the things I think now about education. I’m so glad that my husband and I sent our children to school last year. At the same time, I’m more adamantly pro-homeschooling than ever before.

I have no idea what new experiences and ideas are coming at me down the pike. I may be in for some real yanking around. This is a little scary, for sure, but mostly it’s exciting. I’m more at peace with my ideas now, and this gives me hope. What an adventure!

The other day I read a post about education and immediately wished I hadn’t. Not because it wasn’t good—to the contrary, it was very good—but because I’m mad that I didn’t write it myself. (Guess I wasn’t a worthy portal, grumblegrumble.)

In the post, Heather Sanders writes that Education Is For Everyone. No matter how parents choose to educate their children—public, private, or homeschool—the parent is the one ultimately responsible to see that the learning happens. Every educational method has pitfalls, and every method has potential to yield stunning results. It’s time to stop pointing fingers, she says, and play our part.

After reading her post (and please, I’m imploring you, go read it), I decided there was nothing left to say.

Except this (because I always have something more to say, don’t you know it):  all of life is learning, and everyone learns differently. Let’s not be afraid to:

Claim our choices.
Tell our stories.
Listen deeply.
And whether we believe This, That, or The Other, let’s be gracious.

This weekend my little boy had a birthday. The anticipation was intense. When the big day finally arrived, he couldn’t stop chattering, “I’m so excited! This is the best day of my life!”

His real birthday was Monday, but we celebrated Sunday because of scheduling issues. When I asked him what he wanted for his birthday meal, he said, “Fruit and broccoli soup,” which sounded so ordinary that I felt sorry for him and coaxed him in the direction of something a little more celebratory.

He ended up choosing “that cereal that has the shapes and the rainbows” (Lucky Charms) for breakfast, spicy popcorn to share with his Sunday School class (“spicy instead of cheesy because then the girls won’t like it”), subs with two meats, “salad” (lettuce) and tomatoes, and “long rolls like at the restaurant,” lots of fruit, root beer, and a tornado cake.

I was not enthused about the tornado cake. I made a chocolate sheet cake as per his instructions, iced it once (with the tail end of a long-ago batch of icing, see how much I cared?) and then again with some fresh chocolate frosting. We fashioned a tornado out of straws, a lime, and tinfoil. I dabbed it with icing and plunged it into the cake. It promptly fell over. Unfazed, he propped it up with toothpicks and then proceeded to stud the ‘nado with the heads and arms of Lego people and press wrecked toy cars into the top of the cake.

In my opinion, it was a true-blue disaster. In his opinion, it was a magical work of art. For long swaths of time, he’d sit by his cake, giggling, tweaking, and just looking. I bounced around between thinking the cake was the most pathetic sight ever to feeling guilty because I didn’t even try to being proud of myself for letting my kid create the cake that he wanted. And then we ate it and it was gone, the end.

Monday, he was off school work and dish-washing duty, just to stretch out the partying a bit. As requested, I made broccoli soup for supper and served it with crackers. But he kindly informed me that the soup wasn’t quite right and he really wanted “those crackers with the holes in them” (Saltines) and not Wheat Thins, so it wasn’t exactly a roaring success.

He also told me, all matter-of-fact like, that we should’ve given him more gifts. My first impulse was to argue with him because he did get a lot, and my second impulse was to chide him because spoiled kid, but I did neither. I just looked at him, studying his little wiry-boy frame and his messy mop of hair and his fretful blue eyes. For the first time, maybe, he was realizing that birthdays aren’t pure magic. They hold disappointments, too. My baby is indeed growing up.