letters to my class

Dear Humans,

I was in a corn maze on Saturday and I decided it’s just like life. 

People give you unsolicited advice. But they’re stuck in the corn maze too, so what good is it? Places start to look familiar and you’re convinced you’ve been here before. But you can’t be sure. If you had a bird’s eye view, it would all make sense. But we’re stuck here on the ground level. We can only see as far as the dead end ahead of us. 

So you concoct a strategy. Maybe you always take a left, or you try to make sense of the direction of the footprints on the dirt path. Or maybe you just decide to follow the group ahead of you.

And, finally, you end up right back where you started, though you’re not sure how you did it. But you learn to be grateful for the time spent walking around in the warm autumn sun.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

You might find yourself worrying about the dangers in this world. Especially if you’re one of those people who likes to watch scary movies when Halloween approaches. You might check behind every door, expecting a bad guy to jump out. You might look in every sewer grate, expecting to see a red balloon.

But the times when I’ve been hurt the worst, I’ve done it to myself. Banging my head on my car door when I was simply reaching in to grab my bag. Slicing open my finger when I was trying to wash a Santoku knife. Slipping on the ice because I was in a hurry to get into my nice warm car.

We are our own biggest threats. That doesn’t mean that danger doesn’t exist in the world. It does. But we can do lots to avoid it. We can’t, however, always avoid the danger we pose to ourselves.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I’m a little mad that “life” is a noun. It really ought to be a verb. Life is not something you have; life is something you do–everyday, succeeding and failing, learning and forgetting, finding and losing.

We like to pretend that our lives are contained. We like to think there’s a true us that we’re in the process of finding or uncovering.

But the true us is what we cobble together through years of living. We go through phases and think for a while that we found the true us. But then we keep on living and look back on those old selves with embarrassment. And maybe we learn something along the way–maybe we find a brand of laundry detergent that we really like–but we never figure out enough to stop searching, to stop lifing.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

We’ve been investigating commas lately and it’s made them my favorite punctuation mark. But they’ve long haunted me because I’ve never been quite sure if I’m using them correctly. All my life I’ve searched for the one rule to rule commas.

But it turns out there’s not just one rule when it comes to commas (or many other things in life). There are lots of ways to use commas correctly. And that, like most tools, is what makes them so useful. 

But just because there are lots of correct answers doesn’t mean that all answers are correct. There are many, many ways to use commas incorrectly. But there are also many ways to use them correctly. And the best way we can figure it out is by reading, studying, and writing, not just memorizing rules.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

The other day I was cleaning up the kitchen and saw my daughter’s watercolor paints that she’d left out, the lid flipped open and those eight perfect circles of contrasting colors just waiting for a brush to dab them up and swirl them onto a blank sheet of paper. 

And I thought about all the potential that rests inside of those simple paints. The pigs, ponies, and portraits of people that she’ll create from those cheap, simple paints.

Find your own set of watercolors, whatever it may be. Maybe it’s paint or clay. Or maybe it’s words or numbers. Or maybe it’s your own body on the dance stage or athletic field. Whatever has the potential for you to create new things and ideas to put out in the world. Because the world is starved for new ideas. And the potential to create them lies in the simple things all around us.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

You have very little control over what people remember about you. You’ll spend hours and hours with people, and yet there’s only a few words of yours that they’ll remember. And you don’t decide what they are. They just kind of end up there, and they stay there for years.

If only we had chisels and could carve our words into people’s memories! But we don’t. Instead, people have their own chisels–or fate or chance or luck hold the chisel–and the words of ours that are carved into their minds are what end up there. And no amount of new words can erase them from the stone.

So we have to be careful with our words. Anything we say might be the words that someone remembers, so everything we say should be something that we won’t mind ending up in the stone sculptures of another’s mind.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Clothes are weird. We wake up everyday and we’re supposed to put something on. But it’s not just that easy. Because we’re not just protecting our bodies from the elements. What we wear today has to connect to what we’ve worn in the past and what we’ll wear in the future, and those clothes have to “say” something about the person we think we are putting out into the world. And the funniest thing is that even though we look at ourselves in the mirror, we have the worst view of what we actually look like in those clothes.

Don’t ever believe people who say they “just threw something on.” Cause that’s probably the third or fourth shirt they “just threw on” this morning. Because we’re all working on the project of creating ourselves in the world. We’re not just surviving, we’re living. And it requires imagination and style and a bit of boldness.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

We’ve been working on similes and metaphors lately in writing. And the more we do, the more I’m convinced that it’s the most important thing a writer does.

Because the world is hard to describe. Heck, it’s hard to even understand at all. We don’t always have the senses or the language to say exactly what a thing is. So, instead, we compare it to a thing it’s not. And in that comparison, something magic happens. 

Because things are not all one thing. They exist in a web of connections to other things. And it is only in these connections that we can really get a sense of the truth. Our job as writers is to mine the world for those connections and offer them up to our readers.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

When I walk through my door at home I take my shoes off. I don’t always put them away on the shoe rack, but I do hide them under the couch or  coffee table so nobody trips on them. But when I walk through the school door, I never take my shoes off. I leave them on the entire day. 

One of the things we teach you at school is how to act in public–the places where you keep your shoes on all the time. The rules here are a little different. And the rules are different because the aims are different. At home, we mostly think about ourselves and our families. In public, we have to think about everybody. And so we have to learn how to act accordingly.

This is important because you’ll live much of your life in public. As workers, as consumers, as citizens. With your shoes on.

Sincerley,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

We all know that humans learn from mistakes. So we’re pretty good at giving people (such as ourselves) the space to make them. But we often expect people (including ourselves) to learn simple and immediate lessons from those mistakes. It’s like the toddler who touches the hot stove and immediately learns to never do it again. 

If only all of life’s lessons were that simple.

But they’re not. So sometimes in life we have to let others (and ourselves) make mistakes more than once. And we have to let people learn their own lessons from those mistakes. It drives us crazy when people (like ourselves) make the same mistakes over and over. But all we can do is grant them patience and the space to learn. While learning our own lessons from our mistakes and the mistakes of others.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt