Teacher, what are you waiting for?
THIS WEEK’S WINNER
MANILA, Philippines - Maria Christine Ann Salazar, 23, is currently enjoying her time pampering herself before going back to her workaholic ways. Her varied work experiences with a pre-school, a multi-awarded social business enterprise and a research NGO have broadened her horizon and she now finds herself eager to embrace what else life is in store for her.
Flashback to nearly two years ago. I was sitting under a shed, watching the preschool students run around the monkey bars on the playground. The classroom door in front of me opened, and three kids emerged with their toothbrushes in hand, heading off to the sink. A couple of minutes later, they finished with their teeth-cleaning business and walked back to the room to wait for their nannies to pick them up.
One of the students came back outside and approached me.
“Teacher, what are you waiting for?”
Fast-forward to the present.
Let’s get the facts straight. I graduated almost three years ago, pursued my MA almost two years ago, have worked with three different organizations (not counting the very brief work experience I had in the fashion industry), and I find myself torn between feeling blessed beyond measure, or feeling extremely inauspicious, at least with regard to my career.
Nearly two years ago, a wide-eyed five-year-old kid had the moral fiber to come up to me and ask me this very innocent question. And nearly two years after that, I find myself still bewildered and amazed at how these words formed themselves and came out of that little angel’s mouth.
That student was like Anna to me.
Anna is a homeless and battered four-year-old girl hanging out with her rag doll in the dark alleys of London one foggy night. That’s how Fynn found her. Their adventures and misadventures from that serendipitous meeting until Anna’s tragic death were recorded by Fynn himself, in my favorite book, Mister God, This Is Anna.
Like all the meek preschoolers I have had the honor of teaching and playing with, Anna possesses that gift of wise inquiry. Page after page, I would be astounded how her four-year-old body could possibly contain a brain that seemed to be that of a hundred-year-old sage’s.
But Anna isn’t just a philosopher who has made it her life’s mission to question everything around and even within her just for the sake of questioning and dismantling the well-established rules set in Fynn’s and the other adults’ minds. No. For me, Anna is, first and foremost, a teacher. With the utter simplicity that only a child and a child-at-heart has, Anna is capable of making the most complex and pressing questions that have puzzled humankind since time immemorial seem so easy to unravel and answer. Sure, she has an extremely different perspective on God and Life and everything in between (“Mister God is empty” being one of my favorites), but in the end, she always succeeded in showing to Fynn and to me how she came up with such an idea, and just how silly and blind we are for not seeing it before. Call it the precise clarity of the young, but it appears to me that the older we get, the greater the possibility of us losing sight of or forgetting what is true and what really matters.
Being schooled in universities that a considerable number of people believe are top schools of this country works both ways. I have experienced being given that combined look of admiration and discomfort by fellow job applicants upon their knowing my educational background, clearly communicating the message that I’m so different from them, in an unequal way. I don’t know if it’s them or me who feel the greater level of discomfort in those situations.
I experienced being questioned by people upon their knowing I was fired from my job: What is wrong with you? I don’t know where and how these people conceived of the idea that God passed a decree that says people who graduate from my school will never and should never get fired, will never make mistakes in their profession and will never experience being out of work. Initially I found their repetitious queries annoying but acceptable, but soon enough these questions got into me and I myself began to doubt.
Don’t get me wrong. I know it really was my fault why I was terminated. While I feel sad that I left a bad impression to those people I previously worked with, I don’t choose to regret it because I really learned, albeit painfully, my lesson. During those times that I was processing what happened, it seemed like Anna was sitting beside me, slowly whispering in my ear, “What makes you think this experience of getting fired is beneath you?”
See, Anna didn’t just have the wisdom of a spiritual guru; she was also blessed with the stubborn heart to unfailingly disturb Fynn and me so we would see things differently. Yes, even if it meant brutally pointing out the holes, cracks and rotten parts in our neatly stacked convictions and old, comfortable ways of looking at the world. Then she would leave us to decide for ourselves if we are ready to repair or change them.
But what I find most admirable about Anna is her love for Mister God. It isn’t an exclusive kind of love. It extends to everything and everyone that she sees, smells, hears, tastes and touches. Bugs, caterpillars, candy wrappers, iron railings, pieces of glass, what many people view as garbage and clutter and just “things” were, to Anna, masterpieces of Mister God, creations of limitless possibilities. She isn’t exactly religious, but at such a young age she seems to completely understand what the point of religion is.
When the pastor asked her why she doesn’t go to church, she replied she knows it all. To many this would seem like the most arrogant remark one could ever say, and I believe the pastor didn’t seriously take her answer because she is just a kid, but she continues, “I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees with all of me.” Fynn is right when he says that Anna is able to simplify all the great traditions and belief systems when she states, “And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don’t forget to love yourself.”
I have my own philosophy about religion, and like Anna, I don’t really see myself as religious. This might come as a shock to those who know me, being a Catholic school girl all my life, even holding a top position in a religious organization during my senior year. But after years of philosophy and theology classes, existentialist books and readings, and more importantly, conversations with people from different faiths (and even a lack of faith), I have come to the same conclusion that Anna is able to point out to Fynn by the age of five what many of us miss: Religion is not the bottom line. Love is.
Nearly two years have passed since that simplistic yet thought-provoking question was asked to me by a preschooler, whom I could’ve sworn was Anna in the flesh. The answer to her question is my co-teacher. I was waiting for a co-teacher so we could leave the school together. But what is amazing about that whole experience is this: I wasn’t able to answer her question. I am still dumbstruck by how such an uncomplicated question from the mouth of a little girl could leave me speechless. For it seemed to me that at that moment, her question wasn’t just referring to what I was waiting for at that particular time of that school day, but what I was waiting for my whole life.
From that point up on, I have built relationships with amazing people, walked in places I didn’t even know existed, did things I never thought I was capable of doing and added experiences that beefed up my resume.
But the question still remains. What are you waiting for?
