A letter to Jane

Dear Jane,

How I love your work. Reading your work is like listening to the voice of a women's heart. You are witty, honest, clever, refined. I do have difficulties following you sometimes. This is because you lived in such different times than mine. Your language was baroque, like your music. If only you knew how you never cease to inspire in spite of that. Your stories, the desires of your heroines, they are universal. I love how, in spite of your own situation and the "true" stories surrounding your life, there seems to be a sense of hope. Instead of turning bitter, like some writers do, your characters do not have to suffer for it. I try to imagine you. Sitting by the window, looking out upon green hills and grey skies. Dreaming. Simply dreaming. Your hand, holding a pencil. Your mouth, slightly opened. Most artists I have come to know in my life, were kind of mean and distant. Like they belonged to an exclusive club that you could never give the right password to in order to enter. They could never be great artists unless they learned how to be kind, generous, loving, warmhearted. That is how I see you. It speaks from the words on your pages.
If we were living in the same era, I think we could have been friends. How I would have admired you for your courage to choose for love instead of wealth. To choose a profession that everyone told you was not fit for a women. We could have gone to balls together (I love that fact that you liked to dance). We could have made long walks, sharing thoughts about life and love. How I wish to know more of you. How I wish to make those walks and ask you so many questions about writing and happiness and the way you view your life and works. Would you have done anything different? Would you rather have lived in my time than yours? What would you think of my time? We have freedom of love and equal rights now. Could you ever have imagined that? The manners of society have become much more vulgar though. You would be shocked. We live at a much faster pace. A lot of women, including myself sometimes, read your books and long for a life like that. They long for quietness, seclusion, searching for the right words, being courted, hiding their skin behind long dresses, not giving away their love so easily. But I know you write from that longing yourself. The life in your time was not necessarily like it was in your books.

I wonder so often what you would write about were you living in this day and age. This, I think, is one of my most important questions to you.

Know that reading your stories makes my heart swell in my chest. It feels as big as the sky. You have managed to touch me like that, even after a few hundred years. I thank you for that. Thank you for showing me the greatness that a women can achieve by following her heart.

Yours truly,
Angela

Children vs adults

I have started my new education since a few weeks: the adventure of becoming a primary school teacher. It is hard. I don't have a lot of time left for myself now anymore with heaps of homework to do. I'm thinking about getting an easier job with less hours. My motivation for work is lacking, which results in frustration and arguments with my boss again. All I want to do is study.

I always knew that. I am so much more happy studying than working. I believe I have made the right choice in embarking on this journey. My life is going in the right direction now, I can feel it. I come home from school at 23.00 feeling alive and inspired instead of sleepy. I am grateful.

There is this one question though, that I find unanswered in school. We talk so much about these children. About the way they discover the world by playing, learn by playing. We say: by playing with this colourful cube the child gets to know colours, learns of the texture, of geometrical shapes, of building something by adding other cubes. We need to create a safe and challenging environment for the child to be able to explore.

We cover all the ways in which the child can learn and all the while I keep thinking: to do what? To what end? The child gets to learn all these things and then what? I feel like the common notion in our society is that we teach these children a lot of things and then 'poof' they are ready. They are fully-bred grown-ups. Grown-ups do not create safe environments for each other. On the contrary, they can make each other's lives miserable. Life is hard out there, we say, so you better come prepared with a good education. Does that mean they stop exploring? Stop learning? Stop looking at colours and feeling the texture of things because they already know? They can make money now? They can go to war and get killed? They can stop being curious at the beggar at the end of the street and ignore him?

Children make for much better citizens than grown-ups, I believe. They are innocent, open, spontaneous, courageous, wild, dependent, curious. I feel more akin to them then to most grown-ups. Looking at the children in my classroom it is so hard for me to believe that one of them could be a killer, an abuser, a greedy, manipulative person. They are truly innocent. We pour so much hope and prospect into them. Why do we stop at this when we are fully grown? Why do we stop seeing hope and prospect in each other? There is also always this notion that a child represents hope. Hope of that child becoming a better person than yourself.

But this distinction between a child and a man doesn't work for me. At what point do you give up hope and why? Everyone has been a child, hasn't they? (this is another funny thing that comes with this education, I keep on fantasizing about people as children: Geert Wilders, Silvester Stallone etc.). I do not see why we should stop being children: exploring, playing, being innocent, curious, naive, looking at colours, feeling textures, depending on others.

For me this education at becoming a teacher means to create continuity between myself as a child and myself as a grown-up. For a long time I was under the impression that I was ready learning, because everyone expected me to stop studying and make a living for myself. I felt unhappy working. It felt like it had nothing to do with me, or with my education. But this was just reality. At some point you stop being a child and become responsible. You work hard for a boss that mistreats you because you have to make money and it is just the way the world works. You stop being a child.

Can you imagine the difference? In becoming a teacher, I become a child again. I learn, I help out, I am curious, I am creative, I am innocent. I can pass on my knowledge, my education finally makes sense, because I get to teach these children what I know. I get to express myself to them, and have them express themselves to me. Teaching is the same as hoping. A teacher recently asked us if you have to be an idealist to become a teacher. A lot of people disagreed and said it would be too hard to be an idealist and a teacher at the same time, because you cannot actually cause change in a child. I think they are wrong. I think being a teacher is intrinsically idealist. By helping these children to grow up we expect and hope for them to create a better world than the one we have created. We never give up on a child. And so we should never stop seeing each other as children, no matter how old we are.