LIFE IS ABOUT PERSISTENCE IN THE FACE OF HARDSHIP
I was brought on board the Community Voices Project to share the perspectives of union folks, unorganized workers, and, in my capacity as a professor at San Diego City College, those in the teaching ranks. Why do all these voices matter? As an educator, I have always thought that teaching is first and foremost an act of compassion, a practice or feeling with others that requires deep listening. As the great San Diego Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck put it, “A teacher’s job is to absorb, when necessary, the student’s dagger. If those daggers bother you quite a bit, you certainly shouldn’t be teaching.” It’s not about you; it’s about others.
In the world of the union movement, we are guided by an old motto that expresses the central principle of labor: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” In other words, anyone’s plight should always be everyone’s concern. None of us have real freedom, justice or equity until all of us do. It’s about the greater good. At the heart of the notion of solidarity is, as with teaching, a profound compassion for others.
After 26 years in the classroom, something recently taught me even more about the practice of compassion: I almost died. I was suddenly diagnosed with acute liver failure in June and rapidly declined. If the liver specialists at Kaiser Permanente and UC San Diego Health had not gotten me into the intensive care unit and to the top of the transplant list in time, I would be dead.
Waiting one day longer would have been too late.
What did this teach me? A number of things. The great James Baldwin’s title character in “Sonny’s Blues” says that sometimes you need to “smell your own stink.” I did. I was incredibly humbled, made aware of the lack of control I had over things we delude ourselves we can control. I watched my body and my mind’s decline — I had lost my ability to read deeply, to write and even to think clearly by the time I reached the operation table. My idea of “me” withered, and I was not at all confident I would be there after the surgery. I had to tell the ones I love the most, my son, my wife, my family, my closest friends, that I might not make it out of the operation room the kinds of conversations I would wish on no one, friend or foe.
I also learned how important the love and support of others was in sustaining my family and me at a profound, existential level. Their compassion and love helped keep us going. It gave meaning to suffering.
Finally, I have come to value the labor of health care workers even more, from the brilliant and fiercely dedicated Kaiser doctors and the UC San Diego Health liver transplant team who saved my life, to the nurses, like Jeff in the ICU, who reminded me of Walt Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser” — who was “faithful” and would “not give out” — stepping from the poem to my bedside, whispering to me in the dark of the night that “You can’t fight the river, go with the river.” Amazingly, both he and one of my surgeons used to be my neighbors in Golden Hill and remembered me. It gave a whole new and deeper meaning to what “love thy neighbor” really means.
And now, as I recover, with deep gratitude and compassion for the struggle and suffering of others, it is still hard to write a piece like this, word by word, sentence by sentence, step by step. Life is about persistence in the face of hardship and if we are lucky, we can transcend and heal.
If these voices aren’t worth valuing in the greater San Diego community, I don’t know what is.
After 26 years in the classroom, something recently taught me even more about the practice of compassion: I almost died. I was suddenly diagnosed with acute liver failure.