AWOL Video/Writing Project - Andy

AWOL

DESCRIPTION:
1. What have you included in this video?
This video has footage of four aspects of my life. You see me in my sun and jellyfish protective swimming gear at Brighton Beach. There is video of my friend Heather and her mom Carole and I talking at my apartment. There is the kind of strange looking footage of me reading student work on the computer in my classroom. And finally there is a brief excerpt of a lesson on revelation that I offered to some of my favorite students in last year’s Revelation course.

2. Explain how different parts of the video relate to your way of life.

All four parts of the video related to meaningful aspects of my life.

Swimming has been a big part of my life for the past year. I’ve been learning to swim well using an approach called “Total Immersion”. And for me swimming in the ocean is particularly meaningful. The ocean has been big for me my whole life – growing up in SW Florida and now living in NYC. It makes me smile when a seagull flies over me when I’m swimming backstroke.

I have lived together with Heather for more than 10 years. My chance to be friends with her and enjoy her is one of the most meaningful aspects of my life. Her mom Carole, who I also care a lot about, has recently moved to the apartment downstairs of us in Brooklyn so we have been able to share more family experiences here.

The internet is both a blessing and a curse for my life. The video shows me reading student work – this has made it possible for me to evolve a new kind of teaching in which work continues to belong to the student rather than be “handed in” to the teacher and for students to learn from each other more easily. And in general I’ve learned a lot from the internet. But the internet also represents one of the biggest pits of relative meaninglessness in my life – thousands of hours wasted on endless games of chess & go, stupid staring at the New York Times, reading forums about folding bikes, etc. I’ve tried repeatedly to reorient myself back away from the virtual and to the real, but success has been limited and intermittent.

My teaching has been one of the aspects of my life that I’ve devoted the most time, thought, and energy towards. I feel a sense of pleasure and meaningfulness in helping students to reach deeper insights about the world and themselves and the relationship between the world and themselves. I feel that I’ve been given some important gifts that teaching helps me to share. On the other hand sometimes it feels like my energy is being wasted in a factory system in which most people are just pretending, just going through the motions.



3. What’s seems good about your way of life? What’s bad? What’s neutral?

My way of life is centered around trying to create meaningful situations. Right now the main meaningful situations I’ve been able to create are my life at home, my work at SOF, and my enjoyment of nature and physicality. That’s all good.
What seems bad about my way of life is how our destructive culture has paved and pounded the world and poured delusions into people. So I have to live my life surrounded by pavement and by people who yell at each other or get caught up in stupid fads and identities. I don’t get to be connected with birds and bears and dolphins.

What’s neutral – on the one hand I really appreciate that I don’t have to drive a car in NYC but on the other hand I don’t really enjoy riding the subway. I look forward to the few years between when the cars stop because of oil prices and the streets haven’t yet become unbicyclable. My relationship with food is also good & bad. I’m glad to be a member of the food coop and to be growing tomatos and peppers and arugula at the community garden. But I would prefer to be growing more of my food and knowing more of the people who grew the rest and drinking really clean water from clean rivers and streams.


4. What would you have liked to have included, that is important to your way of life, but weren’t able to?
I would have liked to include footage of our plots in the Brooklyn College Community Garden since that would highlight another aspect of what I find meaningful – working with the Earth, learning how to feed ourselves, understanding our physical reality more deeply.


aspects of a life - andy from juggleandhope on Vimeo.

ANALYSIS & INSIGHT
5. What’s going on with your way of life? What seems to be the general pattern or direction or point or situation?
A general pattern in my way of life is someone who is trying to experience meaningful situations. Someone who is able to focus on teaching and someone else will feed him and give him health care and housing. Someone who has time to enjoy loved ones.

6. How do the good, bad, and neutral in your way of life fit together?
The good aspects of teaching and living in NYC – flavorful and generous city-dwellers, interesting students, being able to teach a self-made and meaningful curriculum, no car, access to meaningful culture are also related to the bad parts of living and teaching in NYC – mass media, pavement, too many people.

7. Does your way of life seem like a “typical American Way of Life”? Why or why not?
My way of life seems in some ways typical. I have a job in “the City” and an apartment in Brooklyn so I have to commute everyday. I spend recreational time in typical places (Brighton Beach, the Botanic Garden, Prospect Park), spend a lot of time on the internet, and “exercise” regularly and eat food other people grew, often at restaurants. You don’t see me doing physical work to bring food or mine metals or fix roads.

But in some ways my life seems pretty different than most peoples’ lives in this culture. You don’t see me watching TV, driving a car, or buying fast food – three of the activities that I associate most with the AWOL. We don’t have an air-conditioner, we don’t try to distract ourselves with celebrity magazines, we don’t get stoned or drunk. We don’t go listen to preachers tell us Official Stories of Politics and Life. We aren’t struggling to get as rich as possible. We try to garden and enjoy reality as much as possible.

8. What aspects of your way of life seem really interesting to you – you’d like to think about them more deeply, figure out how this sort of thing developed historically, what’s going to happen to this aspect of your way of life within your lifetime? What questions do you have about these really interesting aspects of your way of life?
How did it happen that I can not do any “real” work and still live so easily? Who is doing the real work for me? In what ways is my life now reliant on complicated and ultimately fragile social arrangements?