I’m writing this because of a conversation that I had Tuesday at Strike HQ with one of my colleagues. What he said was frank and powerful. He spoke of what it means to him, a relatively new member of our faculty, to take up the mantle of legacy and commitment that we represent here at UNBC and on the picket lines. I’ll leave it to him to share those insights if he chooses to. I want to talk about another aspect of this moment.
I left that conversation feeling better than when we sat down together. This moment over a bagged lunch and snacks helped me to at least envision a path to the threshold that Parker Palmer talks about in his convocation address[1] to the broken-hearted; I began to see a way to move from being “broken apart” to “broken open.”
But the day didn’t start there. It started with me crying in a bathroom stall at the Bon Voyage banquet hall.
Full disclosure. I do not like feelings. I don’t like how they ambush me and, in the words of Bruce Cockburn, come like a wind out of nowhere to “knock you sideways.” So, crying in a bathroom when I’m supposed to be working as a morale-booster had a whole meta level of irony and distress attached to it.
After a long time (which was probably 35 seconds), I said, “Get it together, Mr. Spock,” tugged my science officer blue tunic into place (figuratively speaking), and went back out to finish making my inspirational poster.
The occasion of this unwelcome ambush was a tweet I was writing that noted that Tuesday is the day I give entirely to one-on-one student meetings. Instead of doing that, I was on strike. I made it half-way through this tweet before the wind knocked me down. It felt a great deal like grief, which Diane Ackerman describes beautifully in A Natural History of the Senses as the experience of walking bent over in a headwind. It was as though this wind had sheered my life into two universes: this one at strike HQ, and the one I should be in, where I was akimbo in my office chair scribbling madly in my notebook while my students pulled the endless colourful scarves of questions and ideas out of their sleeves. In my course on tragic drama, this haunting of the actual by the “should be” would be called the tragedy of lost potential.
In September 2018, I was chased into the semester by the black dogs of wildfire smoke, an anxiety and exhaustion that I know many shared (to this day, the smell of woodsmoke makes me nauseated). I was on a very steep downward slope. But every day I got to be in the classroom with my students, to witness their endless capacity for discovery, their willingness to be transformed. Their daily courage made me brave. Their energy and the friction of their grappling with complexity and difficult knowledge kept me from sliding to the bottom of that slope. I hope that, in return, I helped them to put tools in their toolbox that they can use in their own encounters with uncertainty, such as the ones they are dealing with today.
But I am not in the classroom now. We are not together in those rooms that aren’t just spaces but places we make together. I miss my students. I miss what we should be making together. We are all in some ways walking bent over into a headwind.
It seems a bit counterintuitive, I know, for one of the designated morale-boosters to launch into a story about being knocked sideways and broken apart. But today my colleague taught me a lesson that my Spock-based philosophy sorely needed. Instead of answering my “how’re you doing?” with “fine, thanks,” he gave me the gift of a frank account of his own state of mind, and in doing so helped me to begin to reframe this “something unsettled here about my heart” that I’d been working to repress all day.
In Hamlet, the gloomy prince declares that he will get to the heart of the broken state by tenting it to the quick. This is a reference to an early modern medical technique in which the physician would probe the infected flesh with a pointy stick in order to find the “quick,” or the healthy, living flesh. You’d know when you found the living flesh because tenting it would hurt. Only things that are alive and worth saving hurt when you poke them.
This conversation with my colleague was a salutary tenting to the quick. I found myself musing that our situation hurts because it is alive. It makes us—or maybe just me—cry because it is worth saving. The strike is difficult and it hurts and it shows us where we live, what we believe in, what we will fight for. Taken from our offices and classrooms and meeting spaces, put out on the margins, the throughways, the sidewalks, the temporary headquarters and makeshift kitchens, under the sky and the rain and in the headwind, for all of our chants and songs, we are strangely without distracting noise. What is left is solidarity, commitment, talk and walking-the-talk, and the refusal to give up on what is “quick.” And we are out here not because it’s painless but because it’s the opposite.
I realized as our conversation progressed and then moved on to other things that my moment in the bathroom stall was not after all a failure, a shameful break, but a doorway, a threshold between being broken apart and broken open. I just hadn’t realized it until someone else was brave enough to walk through it, to choose not to tug his science officer blue tunic into place and reply “fine, thanks” when I asked him how he was doing.
“Get it together, Mr. Spock,” is good advice. After all, we have a lot to do. But it’s worth it, perhaps, to acknowledge the wind that knocks us sideways so that we can harness it, too, for our sails.
But, for the record, feelings are terrible and I do not like them.
Lisa Dickson
[1] “Living from the Inside Out.” Convocation Address to Naropa University, May 10, 2015,