The Supreme Accomplishment

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” – Arnold Toynbee

As educators ourselves, we know all too well that teachers have good days and bad days.

But if teaching is your calling, there is almost nothing in this world as amazing as those sweet moments in teaching when everything clicks just right and you know that you are exactly where you belong with whom you belong. And you know that the work you do is making a difference. That you are helping to shape the lives of young people in ways that you might not yet even begin to fathom.

And in these moments, work really does become play - it's fun and you are not continually checking the clock to see how many more minutes you have until the work day is done. And you're not thinking about the emails piling up in your inbox or the forms you have to fill out or that grumpy teacher in the teacher's lounge who seems to think that if we could just go back to "the good ol' days" that everything would be better.

No, you are engaged in the moment and you are alive and you are smiling and laughing along with the 20, or 30, or 35 young people whose lives you have been so graciously entrusted. And you are thinking that if just every moment could be like this one, then you would never need to think about the possibility of spending your days doing anything other than this.

But that, you see, is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of this life - we need the good moments, of course. But we also need the bad ones. Because it's only in the difficult times of our lives that we fully come to appreciate the joyful ones.