Pole Position

Out in Front All By Myself

In auto racing, the “pole position” is the one nearest the starting pole. After qualifying rounds, the team that has the fastest time gets the pole position, giving the driver a wide open track ahead for the start of the race. It doesn’t mean the pole position driver will get a clean start and take the lead, necessarily, because all kinds of things can happen before the first turn. The lead belongs to the driver who can hold onto it.

Racecar drivers need a few important qualities to put them out in front of the others: Ability. Agility. Acuity. Discernment. And patience.

I went to 10 schools in 12 years, plus nursery school. Thus, most of my new teachers had to take my measure without my reputation preceding me. It didn’t take them long; I was a hand raiser. When Teacher asked a question, my hand immediately shot up. After the first time or two of being called on, it rarely happened again in that classroom. As a teacher myself, I know now that I was zipping through the teacher’s lesson plan, and there are few things a teacher dreads more than running out of lesson plan before the class ends. I had ability, but classrooms are for learning, not for setting speed records.

My busy mind was never bored, I have to say. I learned to read at age 4, thanks to a mother that taught phonics. If I was out of books I wanted to read, I read the less-interesting-looking ones. I wasn’t athletic, so I spent most of my free time playing with my younger sister, or reading in my room, or combing the stacks at the library. If we went to someone’s house, I made a beeline for the bookshelves, and that’s where I would be found when it was time to go. I had agility: I went wherever the words were. You can see the “big picture” if you climb high enough; I was a natural pole-sitter.

In my almost 60 years, I’ve spent a lot of time up there on the pole (metaphorically speaking), reading and thinking and writing, and thinking some more. When I was asked to condense and teach a homeschool academy’s four year high school literature curriculum in three years, it was a job I thoroughly enjoyed.

I read or refreshed my memory on the whole scope of Western literature, envisioned the 40,000 foot view, then zoomed in on the intersections and junctions; I selected the books that imparted a logical and progressive understanding of history from Gilgamesh to Orwell. I wanted my students to know each work in its historical context, so my lesson plans also included history and culture. It was hard, but the students were up to it, and the discipline demanded a mutual acuity. We kept each other on our toes.

I was more successful communing as a teacher with my students than I ever was with my peers. I have made and moved on from uncounted friendships because the pattern of my life has always been temporary. Prior to Facebook these friends vanished in the rear view mirror, and I rarely kept up a correspondence for very long. After so many moves, and so many lost friendships, there just wasn’t enough time or emotional energy to stay rooted in the past.

My odd and often television-free childhood gave me a different lens on the world, too, so I rarely had that C.S. Lewis moment of friendship: “You too? I thought I was the only one!” In fact, most of my encounters with peers made it pretty clear that we were polar opposites. My music was 10 years older than theirs and I didn’t know how to feather my hair. And they didn’t read.

And that’s the real reason I’m writing today. Not that my peers don’t read, but that I’m the polar opposite of most earth-dwellers. The psyops sort of slid off of me if they didn’t fit my unorthodox (non-psyoped) worldview, which had been informed by decades of being tucked away in basements or up on poles reading the worldviews of many others. All those points of view could never fit neatly into a narrow piece of propaganda.

…there's still no substitute for the experience of close reading as we've come to understand and appreciate it – the capacity to imagine entire worlds from parsing a few lines of text; the ability to achieve deep and meditative levels of absorption in others' psyches. —Will Self

Case in point: Today, I put together what I had been researching and reading over the last few months, and experienced a sense of cohesion and clarity. If it should happen that your own lens is a microscope rather than a telescope, I’m referring to the big picture moment, the “lightbulb over the head” moment when It All Makes Sense. Let’s call the “big picture” a theory, since it’s not proven.

I have this theory that intersects with someone else’s theory about the pole shift and the approaching solar micronova, and I now feel that I understand the events of my entire six decades so clearly that I get frustrated when other people can’t see it right away. Acuity I may have, but discernment? the jury’s still out. And patience? help me, Jesus. I guess I’d suck as an F1 driver.

I really want to help people. I don’t want them to be attacked by a sharklike truth that’s been lurking out of sight until it suddenly rips off a leg. I know what that feels like. All my life, I have received many truths and turned around to pass them on…but often, I’m so far away from the crowd that no one is near enough to take the handoff. I just don’t know how to wait for others to catch up. There’s only room for one in the driver’s seat, or on top of the pole. I wasn’t trained for this.

And that makes me grumpy as a polecat.

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