2024-03-28
I have a dear friend who, if I'm being completely honest, is more intelligent, erudite, and witty than I am. Despite this, they are kind enough to have continued a long-running email volley with me. My trying to keep up with their brilliance occasionally leads me to saying something coherent.
This was excerpted from one of those lucky conversations.
Perhaps it's the years of mime training talking, but I sometimes fear that words are a bit like loaded guns. People have a terrible habit of waving them around with alarming casualness until one finally goes off and someone gets hurt.
The irony of the verbal double tap of "clown" and "teacher" defining so much of my life is that I was not the first person to call myself either. I actively resisted and dismissed both ideas.
Looking back, I think that could have been my own 'brain weasels' keeping me from joy. Clown, and exploring it in the lab, are some of the activities which have brought my life the most pleasure.
As a rule, I don't care much for titles or the importance people apply to such titular affectations.
I will grant that titles are handy shortcuts. They ease introductions, and offer us a starting point. If you wear the "teacher" hat, I know you're the facilitator of knowledge for the moment where I will be trying to learn something. I can toss on the "student" beanie, and we can play a game called "classroom" together because we're both vaguely aware of the rules.
I find teaching humbling. When I first started offering workshops, I was immediately confronted with what I didn't know deeply in my bones about the work I love. No amount of handwaving can cover that up, and any hopes of helping someone learn what I'm trying to share is gone if I don't do the work to know it better.
Beyond that high stakes game of internal fact checking, there's a more personal reason why I teach. I discovered it in the middle of teaching a workshop.
Things were winding down for the evening, and I found myself sitting on the stage by myself with the students occupying the audience seats. It had become pretty casual by that point, and someone off-handedly asked me why I offered to teach the workshop.
First, I told them I did it to keep my skills sharp.
See above. It absolutely does.
Then I said that I liked to share what I knew, so as to give something back (forward?) for all the help wiser clowns had similarly offered me.
Also very true, if directionally questionable.
One of the big topics of the evening had been vulnerability. That likely inspired the flash of insight which led to my admitting the most-real truth. I gently patted the stage and said...
"I get lonely sometimes, and so I hope to help make more clowns so I can have some company up here."
That was probably the night I started calling myself both.