Teaching is a profession that contains days of great satisfaction, even exhilaration, as well as days of frustration and deep disappointment. No one is immune to this. In the world beyond the classroom every human finds that external conditions beyond their control sometimes threaten to overwhelm. At such times, the only resource may be our beliefs and attitudes.
This leads me to the matter of the miners in Peru—in particular, a man named Edison Peña. Perhaps you remember him—the miner who loved Elvis and who ran daily for exercise in that dark cavern below ground, listening to Elvis through his ear buds. We can probably all agree that having a mine collapse around us is a more extreme problem than we usually face at our jobs, yet this was the problem faced by all the miners. Against all predictions, the event even had a happy ending.
Not long after the rescue, I saw Peña interviewed, through an interpreter, by David Letterman. Peña had just run in the New York Marathon. He had been offered the chance to attend—instead he asked to be permitted to run in it. Letterman asked only a few questions because after each one, there was a delay to translate the question and then translate the answer. During the wait time, though, Peña’s body language made his reactions clear, even while the audience waited for the words.
Letterman asked what it was like the first day that Peña entered the mines to become a miner. As he remembered his first trip down the shaft and into the mine’s corridors, Peña’s reluctance and even dismay showed on his face. He acted out his desire to turn around and leave as quickly as possible, yet we saw him turn back to the front and march into the mine to work.
Letterman asked about jogging down in the mine, and Peña nodded, placing imaginary ear buds in his hears and bobbing his head. The pleasure he took in the music and the running showed in his face. Then Letterman brought up Elvis. Peña’s smile broadened during the translation. Seconds later he was standing and singing with plenty of Elvis hip action.
Now, if any of us had been asked last year about the future of a Peruvian miner with limited education, few of us would have predicted the dramatic rescue, the New York Marathon, singing on TV or being interviewed in the U.S. Perhaps this is just more evidence that “the impossible simply takes a little longer.”
W can look at Peña’s actions and derive some advice for how to handle difficult times:
1. Do what must be done. Whether it is entering a mine because that is the only available job or revising a lesson plan yet again, we know our duty and must press on to do it.
2. Do what is good for you. Being trapped in a mine would be a great excuse to stop exercising, but excuses get us nowhere.
3. Do what you love. We all need to feed our own souls with things that bring us joy. Every human is more than just a job description.
4. Do keep believing. If we believe that our down times are “darkness before the dawn,” we are better served than when we simply label those times “the pits.”
5. Keep doing. Challenging ourselves to keep participating and trying new things brings more joy that simple sitting on the sidelines of life.
