Outside, Looking in

This describes my whole life.

I've spent most of my life being neither this nor that.  I find it a bit of mixed blessing in that sometimes, it would be nice to be included, but most of the time, I'm just as happy not to be.

I didn't always find it thus. I've spent untold quantities of mental, physical and emotional energy raging at the machinery of social and professional circles (often with quiet demureness at the outside of the latter, but mental and emotional energy expended, nevertheless).

If I can get outside of my ego, though, it's been enormously to my advantage to be outside, gauging loyalties, strategizing my own (later, my boys') place(s) in the world. I see both boys playing the same game, studying the rules, then figuring out how to beat the world at its own game. It's hard wired into who we are.

Having the emotional struggles is something I can dispense with altogether. It's not convenient.  It gets in the way of clear thinking. And when that happens, I do exactly what I did in the fourth grade.  Stationed near the door, I would sometimes throw a pencil out of the classroom, steal out of my desk ostensibly to retrieve it, then perambulate around the school. It was a small school, a single hallway stretching down two levels of classrooms. But I would circuit up one set of steps, wander down the upstairs hallway, sometimes peering into the faculty lounge, meander down the front fire tower, then back up past the learning center and younger kids' classrooms, then slip back to my own classroom and my own desk.

I was only caught once all school year.

The school is closed now, as is the parish. I hear about my younger guy sometimes circuiting his much bigger school, comfortable in his own skin (and hair).  I see my older guy, recently disappointed in his own pursuits, trying to figure out his own way forward.

They have me to lean on. And I have them.

And together, we are inside. Looking out.