Wholeness
Kamia F. Slaughter
Have you ever stopped to think about what it means to "be whole" in educator and practitioner spaces? I feel like folks use that expression so lackadaisically these days to the point that it has become ambiguous. I used to think that if I just made it through a whole day, I had put that concept into practice. I'm sure you know the days I'm talking about— the kind that lingers on past the 8 hours insinuated in your contract, the kind that reminds you that you're not paid nearly enough for your labors of love or even the kind that makes you second-guess if you chose the right career. Though this type of "whole" functioned as an adjective, it didn't quite describe the nuance of the word's potential.
Still, I knew colleagues who claimed they "were whole." Linguistically, that's different from getting through a whole day. However, I could not relate to this idea as much as I could the former. I refuse to believe that my educator and practitioner identities are complete in the ways that comments like that suggest they should be. Does this not diminish the purpose of education, networking, and professional development? I do not desire to be whole in this regard. The noun that is this word tells me I have more work and more learning to do.
What more people might relate to, one in which I waver in my commitment to, is "showing up whole.” Translated, this would mean showing up entirely, and would reposition "whole" as an adverb. For many folks, this practice might actualize in several ways. It may mean communicating your worst days just as often and clearly to colleagues as you do your best days. It also may require you to actively seek relationships beyond your office, department, or professional inner circle. It could even manifest as you share parts of your personal life in work settings, wear attire that reminds you of home, or engage in work that fuels yourself and your community.
Perhaps, I'm still focusing on the wrong word. I've spent so much time on how "whole" operates as an adjective, noun, and adverb, respectively, that I may have descended into the most important ones. In each example presented, I preceded "whole" with various iterations of verbs. As educators and practitioners, I wonder what our work would look like if we were to just "be." My hope is that we relinquish ourselves of the pressures and guilt associated with wholeness and anchor ourselves in being.
Note from the Author: For context, I used to be a 2nd-grade teacher, and one of my favorite subjects to teach was reading/language arts. My colleagues and I used mentor texts to model good writing, where we would dissect and reconstruct sentences by parts of speech. That inspired my approach to this post.
