Good Life Project - Stephen Haff | Still Waters in a Storm

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Stephen Haff is the founder of Still Waters in a Storm, a one-room school serving mostly Spanish-speaking immigrant children in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Previously, he taught English at a public school in Bushwick for nearly a decade, before leaving to recover from the effects of extreme psychological stress that led him to re-evaluate how he would return to serve kids as an educator and activist. In his new book, Kid Quixotes (https://amzn.to/34zxPit). Stephen shares a powerful story about the kids and an incredible 5-year project to translate and perform a modern version of Don Quixote. He earned his MFA in Theater Studies at Yale, and has made a living directing plays and writing essays for the Village Voice and other publications.You can find Stephen Haff at: Website: http://www.stillwatersinastorm.org/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So working as a New York City public school teacher in a pretty tough part of Brooklyn, Stephen Hoff was moved to make a difference in a system that seemed really stacked to make that almost impossible. And what started as an act of love and devotion to his students led to some really profound revelation, but also quite literally led to the demise of his mental health, his relationships, and nearly his life. Forced to step away after what he describes as a breakdown, Stephen had to completely re-figure how to keep serving these kids who he loved so much, but in a very different way. It took a number of years to find its new form, but slowly and painstakingly,

still waters in a storm. A one-room free school serving mostly Spanish-speaking kids of immigrants in Bushwick, Brooklyn was born. Their one rule, everybody listens to everybody. What started as a project to re-engage kids, reconnect them to their voices and cultivate a passion for learning and writing, it ended up growing into something that is now so much bigger, so much deeper, and so much more profound. He shares this beautiful story and an incredible five-year project that he has all the kids working on in his new book, Kid Quixote. And in today's conversation, we dive deep into this really rich and powerful journey. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet-black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

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My dad used to say that every person is a special case. Don't look at people as part of a category of person. Each person is a special case. Each person has a story. And if you start to think in generalities about types of people, then you're being very unfair to the individuals. And you're missing your opportunity to know someone, to really know someone. So there's politics in that too, that every single life matters. Every single story matters. And anything that derails us from that goal of understanding is politically dangerous. that allows people to ultimately be dismissed or in the worst case scenario, like is happening now

in our country, to be scapegoated, to be blamed for whatever anger or disappointment people might be feeling in their lives. So as soon as people start to split themselves into us and them, then it becomes easy to dismiss or even to destroy entire groups of people. To erase them. Yes. So those were early political influences. And my mother has always been extremely kind. And never once have I ever heard her raise her voice to anyone, ever. And neither of my parents laid a hand on us in anger, ever. And my mother made a special point, although it wasn't like a calculated point. It wasn't like she had an agenda to do this.

She just was genuinely interested in everyone she met. Everyone. Everyone was interesting. And because of that, she was often wounded, you know, because people wouldn't always return her kindness. But that didn't stop her. She had figured out what mattered to her, and she kept living by it. And I remember there was a farmer's market that we went to on weekends because the town that I grew up in, in Ontario, Waterloo, Ontario, was surrounded by farms, especially Mennonite farms. And my mother loved talking with every vendor. So going to the market was an all-day thing. And she would even go to the Mennonite farms. And the Mennonites lived in a way that was very different from ours. These were old order Mennonites, so they had no electricity and they had no cars.

They had no color in their clothing. Everything was black and white. And they lived without any sort of communication beyond their community. And there, you know, there were biases against them, not like everybody hated them, but just that they were different. They were other and maybe even considered somewhat backward. But my mom loved them. She just saw each person like she she could not be distracted by people's generalities about that group of people. She still saw them as this person and this person and this person.

So I think when I look for the origins of my political passions, My parents are the first influence. And then the country of Canada, and especially Quebec, would be another important influence. When I'm building on that foundation, when you do come out of school, what did you, because you end up eventually doing in grad school at Yale for theater. Yes. What happened in that window that drew you to the world of theater and saying, like, I don't want to just dabble, I don't want to explore, but I actually want to dive backwright named George Walker, who in Canada is very well known and around the world. In fact, his plays have been translated into many different languages and produced all around the globe. But in Canada, he's the most celebrated and popular playwright. And I met him in my last year of college in Canada.

And I decided to write my undergraduate thesis about his plays. And so I did a lot of research on his work and what other people had said about his work. And then from that research and from getting to know him, I suddenly had political feelings that I felt like I could do something about. Before I had had those feelings, my love of French and Quebec culture, my parents' profound respect for every individual person, all of that was inside me. But I hadn't yet had any kind of vision of what I could do. What would be my response? i told you earlier i just wanted to keep having pleasure um but when i met george he taught me about class he taught me about the working class the working poor his plays were all about that they were all about the struggles of people who suffer injustice.

And I realized that that's what he was doing about it. That he grew up in the working class and he was taking action by writing and producing plays. And that that was a way that I could bridge my pleasure and some kind of purpose. And it was thanks to him because he was just so nakedly political and so funny too. His plays are hilarious. There was a defiance in him that I really liked, because even as I had been studying my academic subjects for the pleasure of them, George took action by writing plays and producing plays. That's what he did. He grew up in the working class, the working poor,

and then he took all the feelings he had about that and all the injustices suffered by people in that social caste and turned it into something that was defiantly funny. And my studies, while they brought me pleasure, also, I had started to feel like I was just doing as I was told to do. Like I was being a good boy by studying and trying to get good grades. And it was all about getting good grades. And I remember George telling me his daughter was at the time I think she was what like three years old or something and I came over to his house once when I was trying to write the last chapter of my thesis on his work and the little girl of course wanted to talk with me and show

me stuff and and then he said to her he honey, you need to give us some time alone now. We have to help Steve get at least a B on this project. So the way he said that with a smile on his face is like, he was making me aware that in the world, those grades don't mean anything. You know, it's really justice means something. Compassion matters. Grades really don't. And my goal of always being the top student in every year, all the way through my education from the time I was a kid, all the way through graduate school, George Walker started to break down that, that barrier that I had that kept me in the ivory tower and had me serving the ideals of academia more than the life of the streets. So that, so that that he was the bridge and then i went to yale to study with this new idealism and this sense of purpose and i ended up directing several of his plays at yale three of them

and then one of his plays came to yale a major production. So there I was at an institution of sort of elite academic and artistic study. And I opened the door to George, who I think he didn't even graduate high school. He certainly did not go to college. He may just have finished at high school. But when he started, when he broke through as a playwright, he was driving a taxi in Toronto. So it was like, he showed me the way to the streets, to what he called the articulate poor, the people who suffer economic injustice, but that does not mean they have any deficit of intellect or language. So he introduced me to them, and then I opened the door to Yale, to that institution of old money and power.

So that was that bridge that he gave me. When it's time for you to leave Yale and then go into the real world, you end up back in New York after that, right? Yes. I went like almost all of my classmates, I went to New York. Right. We all thought, okay. Because that's what you did.

Yeah. That's what we did at that time. And we thought, wow, we have a degree from Yale. Everything is open to us now. And the reality was not consistent with that entirely. I did end up directing plays downtown off-off-Broadway, and I wrote for The Village Voice and American Theater Magazine and other publications, and I had a job at the Lincoln Center Research Library for the Performing Arts. So I was getting work in theater,

which is not easy to do. There's not a lot of jobs that sustain you in that world. And then I even got a job not too long out of Yale. I got a job at New Dramatists, which was, still is, an outstanding workshop for professional playwrights. And I worked for them for years, putting together the workshops for the writers who were trying to develop their work. So I was working in theater. It wasn't exactly prosperity, but I was doing it. And then something happened. I guess it was the next step in my evolution as a person, as a politically conscious person. I just felt one day like I was putting on shows for my friends. You know, you get to know, in New York theater, after a while, everybody knows everybody. And you sort of go to each other's shows and say nice things.

And they come to your show, you go to their show. And, and I thought, well, this is just in a loop. We're just, we're, uh, we're in this circle and we just keep going around and around. At that moment, when I was starting to feel that way, I read a book called Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol. And it was about the lives of school children in the South Bronx. And this was in 1990, would have been 96, maybe somewhere around there that I read that, maybe 97. I read that and I was, I couldn't believe that I hadn't known what I didn't know. There was so much I didn't know. I had George's passion about the working class and the articulate poor. That was inside me and my parents' values were inside me.

But I had no idea exactly what people were living through until I read that book and what condition the schools were in and what kids had to go through. And how it might as well have been a different planet from the one I grew up on. I couldn't believe it. Yeah. I mean, for context, most New Yorkers know this, but if you hadn't been around, like the late 80s and into the early 90s in the South Bronx was, I mean, a bit of a terrifying place. A bit of a war zone. It was coming out of the decimated by a crack. Yes.

And just, it was so much empty, burned out buildings all over the place, a tremendous amount of violence and gang life on the streets. And there was a lot of beauty and grace and amazing people, but at the same time living in this environment. Yes.

And I had no idea. I mean, I went, when I would ride the Metro North commuter train from New York to New Haven, whenever I would go back and forth between Yale and the city, the train would go past some of the Bronx. And there were areas that looked like they had been bombed in a war. And they were on fire, like literally there were fires all around and there were great sort of skeletal remains of

buildings. And, but it was just something I glimpsed from the train and I didn't know really what it all meant until I read that book. And then I began to understand that there was a lot I didn't know. And the way Jonathan Kozol wrote with such down-to-earth, humane compassion made me want to do something about this. I got really angry. And I said, I can't believe it. Look what I've done. I was educated at Yale. I was raised in middle-class prosperity. I have this elite education and what am I doing with it? I want to go somewhere where someone can use what I have, where I can feel useful because I didn't feel useful. And that was what I really, really wanted to feel like what I had to offer could matter to someone else.

So I went around the city applying for teaching jobs, visiting schools. I visited elementary, middle schools, and high schools. And I only went to places, neighborhoods, where I felt there was a need. You know, I didn't go to affluent neighborhoods. I had no interest in teaching children of privilege. I had nothing against them. They're children, you know. They're not to be blamed for the fact that they live in privilege. But I wanted to work with people in places where most people didn't want to go. And so I visited all these places in all four boroughs. I didn't make it out to Staten Island, but Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx.

And I landed at Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. And the reason why I ended up there, there were a couple of reasons. One is they couldn't keep teachers. People would go there and I forget what the numbers are. It could have been something as drastic as like 50% of all new teachers were gone after one year and then 75 after two years. So the rate of dropout by teachers was severe and they really wanted me to stay there. They had me there and they didn't want to let me go. And that's what I wanted.

I wanted to belong in the sense that I had a role to play, that I had a place. I was useful to people. So in my interview with the principal, a woman named Renee Pollack, who was brash and aggressive, but also enlightened. She was combative with most teachers. She would browbeat them and harass students into what she considered respectful behavior. But she did recognize when something of value was happening in a classroom. She could see that. And when I interviewed with her that first day, she took me on a tour of the school, but she waited until the bell rang for students to change classes in the middle of the day. She wanted me to walk through the halls with her so I could see what life in the hallways was like,

and then she also took me into classrooms so I could get a feel for how the kids behaved in class. And it was, it was wild. I mean, the hallways were so full of life. They were so, it's like the walls were shaking. These kids were so vibrant and it was loud, incredibly loud in there and crowded, so crowded, people bashing into each other and shouting insults at each other and making jokes. And in the classrooms, they kept cracking jokes. And the kids were so funny that I thought, this is where I need to be. First of all, no one else wants to teach here. And second of all, the kids are hilarious. And they're so full of life. And it reminded me of this time in Canada when I had met a young coyote, an animal at an animal rehabilitation center in Eastern Canada. And this is a place where they would find wild, people would find wild animals

that had been injured or babies that had been abandoned, and they would bring them to this place. And this place would nurse them back into health and strength and then let them go back in the wild. But there's this young coyote who had been abandoned, or the mother had been killed. I don't remember exactly why. But this young female coyote had become attached to the humans there, and it was impossible to return her to the wild. She was too much a part of the human community, and she couldn't make it in the wild because she was so trusting. So when I met that coyote, they said, do you want to meet her? And I said, yes, very much.

So they opened the door to one of the little houses on the property and she came flying out and ran up to me and rolled around on the ground and showed her belly to say like, I'm not a threat and please love me. And there was a look in her eyes that I thought, oh my God, I have never seen anything, anyone as alive as this animal is alive. I don't know how else to describe it except that her eyes were deep and radiant. And I mean, I grew up with a lovely dog, wonderful, but this animal was twice as vibrant as any domestic dog I've ever met. And so meeting those kids at Bushwick High School, I felt that same way. I thought, whoa, wait, I've been sleepwalking. This is what is alive. These kids are alive. And I had never experienced anything like that before. Suddenly all of my studies seemed pale

and these kids alone were full of color. So I accepted the job offer to teach English there. And that was the next phase in my evolution as a political person and a compassionate person. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. There was a lot of patience required. Not necessarily my... I mean, I had to be patient with the kids because they were not, in general, I don't like to generalize, but in general, they were not pleased to be in school. This was not a good fit for them. The way they were being bossed around did not suit them. And so I had to be patient with that aspect that they were dealing with a situation that to them felt with myself too, because I was in a whole new world that I couldn't

understand all at once. And I made many, many mistakes. I initially tried to be friends with the kids, like to be, I'll just be super nice and there's no way they won't cooperate with me. Well, that was wrong. I was, it wasn't wrong to be kind, but it was wrong to sort of surrender, you know, the way a dog or that coyote surrenders by showing its belly. That is a mistake because they told me themselves, the students told me, they said, mister, you're nice, but people take your kindness for weakness. And then, you know, with the short-term vision of somebody who feels trapped, they would

just lash out. And I'm, I was the front line. I was the representative of the society that oppressed them. In the classroom, it was just me and the students. And didn't matter if I had a good heart. It didn't matter what intentions I had. I represented that institutional power that pushed them down. I represented the gatekeepers who kept the gate shut against them.

And that's what I had to understand over time is how they saw me. So they liked that I was kind, but they had no respect for me. And so then my reaction, born of frustration, you know, initially I thought, well, I have to know everything as a teacher. I have to come in here as the expert. That's the key to my authority, knowing everything, or at the very least, knowing more than they know. So if I know more than they know, then I'm in charge. And being in charge is what matters. So there was partial truth because, you know, even if they dislike school, they're coming there for something. Because a number of kids just drop out. They just leave school.

So the ones who actually show up do want something. And I'm supposed to be the one to provide that, the education. So yes, I'm supposed to know some things and help them to learn things. But it was a big mistake to think that I had always to be the expert because I couldn't hang on to that. The tension was exhausting. You know, the tension of always having to maintain authority really depleted me. And then I started acting out in ways that I was not at all proud of. You know, I would yell at the class and throw things around the room. I remember when I was reading out loud to them, if they weren't paying attention, on more than one occasion, I would throw the book, not at a kid, but hurl it across the room against the wall, until it and then it exploded into dust.

And I overturned furniture, desks and chairs to get their attention. I would stand up on top of the teacher's desk and just preach at full volume. And now I don't do those things anymore. And thank goodness. But also at the time, that was a step I had some sort of control and then figure out now that I have this control, what do I do with it? So if I could intimidate a group of kids and convince them, as they told me, they said, one of them once said to me, you're the nicest teacher in the school and you're the craziest. They had, they, there was something, I was trying to follow their advice about not being too nice. And all of this gets very complicated in my mind even now. It's easy to say all of that was wrong, but I don't regret it

because going through that phase, that sort of loud and violent phase, brought me to the other side where I realized that what the kids really wanted all along was to know that I loved them. And I think initially when I was so submissive and, you know, too nice, that wasn't loving because I wasn't ready to set boundaries. I wasn't ready to say, this is right and this is wrong. And I wasn't strong enough to protect them. And even though they're big, like some of them, a lot of them are taller than I was, and they might be physically intimidating and have this incredible forward energy, they're still kids and they still needed to feel safe they needed to feel like someone in that crazy school and in that crazy school system loved them and love isn't just being nice

so love is sometimes letting them know that you have their back that you are an advocate for them. You are going to stand up for them and protect them as much as you can. That's what they want. And they can't get it because if there's 30 kids in a room and one adult, what family on earth has 30 children and a single parent. It's impossible. So I realized through this complicated marriage of what they called my craziness, my tendency to preach and throw things and all, and my genuine interest in each one of them as a person, I discovered that that's what they needed. They needed love. And that love is a complicated idea. I realized fairly early on, once it dawned on me that they're just kids who need love,

that when I asked myself, well, what can I do to show them that I do care about them, that I love them? And I thought of what did my parents do for me? So my parents shared a passion for what they loved, but most of all, they listened to me when I had something to say. And in school, typically, that is not practiced. To this day, listening on the part of students means essentially obeying. It means do as you're told. It means answer my questions, my teacher questions, because I know the important questions to ask. And I have the answers. And I will listen to you to see if you are paying attention. I'll listen to you to see if you can come up with the right answer. And when it dawned

on me at some point that not only did I not have the answers, but I didn't even want to have answers, that I wanted something else. And that something else was common ground with the students. We had been separate. We had been battling each other. There I was, the representative of civic power, and they were the oppressed. And it was a battle. It was a power struggle in the room. But then I realized that what they wanted and what I wanted was common ground, a place where we could be together and listen to each other and try to understand each other. And there's that upbringing by my parents again, that idea that each person is a special

case. And so all of that wisdom and those values that my parents had given me as a boy, and that the bilingual and egalitarian society of Canada had given me, and George Walker, with his outspoken compassion, had given me. And then Jonathan Kozol in his book had raised awareness of what children were going through in the city. All of that came together in an epiphany that the kids and I wanted the same thing. We wanted common ground. And we wanted to know that we were safe together. So I told them that if there was anything that they wanted to say during class time, but for whatever reason they couldn't, whether it was too private, personal,

whether it made them seem weak in the eyes of their classmates, whatever it was, or just a concept that we were talking about that they didn't understand and they were reluctant to raise their hand and ask, that they could write that to me in a notebook. Each one of them had a notebook and they could write to me and I would write back to them. And I called that our ongoing correspondence. So they would write during class or after class or whenever. And then I would collect the notebooks and every night I'd go home and write back to each kid. And I would, these were not, this correspondence had nothing to do with correcting language. It had nothing to do with any assignments at all. It was purely, what do you want me to know about you? How can I help you?

And then we wrote back and forth. And they often had questions for me. They wanted to know more about me. But one kid wrote to me, what are you? And I said, what do you mean? What am I? I don't understand. And he said, well, I'm Dominican and I'm black. And I said, well, I guess I'm Canadian and white. But that wasn't what he wanted to know. He kept pressing me. He said, no, but what are you? He was trying to get at some other, something about me that he couldn't define

because I didn't seem to belong in any number of categories where he might've placed me as a white person, as an English-speaking white person. I don't know what his categories were, but the students could ask me questions, could tell me about feelings, and I would write back to them because I told them in class, it's impossible that all 30 of you can get the attention you need from me. And so those correspondences were the most important thing we did. All the other classwork that we were required to do in order to prepare for the state tests, the standardized tests, really was just the price we had to pay for our correspondence. We had to do that other stuff in order to have the opportunity to talk to each other. Ultimately, well, it's interesting because at that school then, my classes wanted to organize. They wanted to do something about their oppression.

And so they came up with this idea called the Bushwick Union of Students, which has an acronym of BUS. And their slogan was Get on the Bus, which they had learned in class from the freedom riders. So there was this social justice activist spirit in them. And I remember the principal warning me, do not mobilize these kids. Because if you do, it will get out of control. It's dangerous. But she did invite us to her office to meet with the kids. And the kids had written up a proposal of things they would like to see changed in the school. And she did listen to them. I don't know. I don't remember if anything much happened as a result, but that was a significant step that they felt they could, that they were, I was advocating for them and that I got them that meeting with the principal and they were speaking on their own behalf.

That right there, the correspondence, the ongoing correspondence, that was really the beginning of what I would do when I opened my own one-room schoolhouse in that neighborhood. What caused that transition? What led you to this moment where you said, it's time for me to step out and it's time for me to do something else? I had a massive breakdown.

At the time, I didn't know that I had inherited bipolar disorder, which ran in both sides of my family. A number of my first cousins were addicts and it's likely that they were treating themselves, medicating themselves with alcohol and drugs. And there were a number of suicides in my family. But most of that information was kept at a distance from me. I was protected from knowing much about that. So I didn't know

that I had a history of, a genetic history of mental illness. And the intensity of the experience at Bushwick High School and how drastically different it was from anything I had experienced before, set me up for this breakdown when what I had genetically reacted, you know, like a chemical reaction with the situation I was in. And I just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't, I couldn't show up to work. I was done. And at the same time, something that contributed to my burnout was that I had started a theater company with my students at Bushwick High School. And we had been studying Shakespeare in class, and I couldn't get them to take an interest in it, because I was teaching it in the way that I had been taught, which was to just read it from beginning to end, and as we read through it, comment on patterns of imagery or

techniques of characterization, things like that, literary elements. And they were not interested at all. So then I thought, well, why don't I let them, why don't I ask them to translate the Elizabethan verse and rewrite scenes as they would speak them with their friends. I said, rewrite it the way you would say it. And they asked, of course, right away, are we allowed to curse? And I said, yes, however you would say this, that's how I want you to translate it. So they did that. They worked in pairs or groups of three and they did scenes. I chopped up Hamlet into scenes and I handed them out and one to each group. And then they did the scenes and performed them for each other in class. And they made each other laugh so much because the language they spoke on the street was very poetic. I mean, it was full of humor, wit, imagery, metaphor. I mean, that's how languages survive and grow and evolve,

is by listening to the language of the street. And all of them also spoke Spanish. So it became a trilingual hamlet that was Elizabethan, street slang, and Spanish. And they made the decisions about what to translate and what to keep. And they had such a good time doing it that they asked if they could perform it somewhere for somebody. And that was the beginning of the company that would go on to do, let's see, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear. And we would also adapt Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as plays. And the group, one of the members of the group named them Real People Theater. And he said, that's because we're not actors, we're real people theater. And he said, that's because we're not actors, we're real people, and we're telling our stories. So I would teach all day, then I would rehearse for hours, and then I would go home and write back to my students in the ongoing conversation. And it's not surprising that the woman I was living

with at the time couldn't take it anymore because I was so completely devoted to this work that I was neglectful of her. And I pushed myself so hard and even managed to get a grant to rent a space in the Bushwick neighborhood, which was a former sweatshop, a curtain factory, and turned it into a theater and performed all these rewritten, reworked classics. We started getting attention in the newspapers and started working with a renowned theater company in Manhattan, the Worcester Group, and doing all kinds of crazy things like traveling. We traveled all around North America, from New York to LA, Chicago, Toronto, Nova Scotia, and Europe. So all this was happening at once. The teaching, five classes a day, five days a week, 30 kids in a class. So 150 students in my classrooms and a theater company doing very ambitious work and traveling and,

and, uh, correspondence with those 150 kids, all these things that I was doing all at once and I couldn't sustain it. And, and I had this breakdown and, and I just walked away from all of it. I just, one day I, I just couldn't carry on. And I left and I went home and the kids in the theater company tried to reach out to me and other friends did too. And I just, I said, I'm done. I'm just done. I have to go away. I have to go back to Canada. And, and I remember just a couple of days before I got on the train back to my parents, cause I called them up and I said, I can't keep going. I just can't. I can't take care of myself. I can't teach. I can't think. I'm broken. I need to come home. So they said, yes, please come home. So a couple of days before I did that, I got stuck in my own bathroom. I was in the bathroom and even though my girlfriend had moved out sometime before

I still had the habit of closing the bathroom door when I was in there it's an old habit and then I when I tried to leave the bathroom the door wouldn't open and so I was pulling and pounding and trying everything I could and the door would not budge. This was in the summer. It was in August in New York, and it was extremely hot and humid, and the door had just sealed shut, and it was impossible to move. So I thought, well, this is it. I'm going to die in here. This is how I die, because I didn't have a phone in there. I didn't live with anyone. And except a cat. I had a cat. And I didn't know what I was going to do. I really thought that I was just going to die in that bathroom. And I thought, wow, this is what an end. And then I realized that I had in my pocket fingernail clippers.

So I used them and the file to pry the veneer off the inside of the wooden door. And then to just dig and dig and dig through the wood, which was like particle board. And, and finally dig like the entrance to a cave that I could crawl out of. And so I just felt like that was that if I wasn't already committed to leaving New York, that that was a sign. New York was trying to eat me. It was trying to swallow me whole. So I went back and the middle part is really boring. I went back to my parents' house and I went down to the basement. Their house is on a hill, so the basement had a huge picture window that looked out over the yard. Big grassy yard full of trees and flowers where I played when I was a kid. And I slept down there and I just spent day after day, week after week, month after month, staring out the back window

at the trees. Because that was the only thing that didn't ask anything of me was nature. And there were some rabbits and squirrels and raccoons and I could watch them and there was no stress. At the same time, I was an outpatient at the hospital in town because I had attempted suicide. And so I was seeing a therapist, a really intense process. And then also experimenting with medications, cooperating with a psychiatrist who worked in the same part of the hospital. And that process was so tedious. And really, while I was going through it, I had no faith in it. Even though they diagnosed me as having bipolar disorder, which they ascertained by asking me questions no one had asked me before. Primarily, what are you doing when you're not depressed?

No one had ever asked me that question. So I had gone to therapy in the past, but it was for depression. And I think the therapist just took it on faith that I said I was depressed and I was depressed. But it turned out that the important key to the whole thing was that when I wasn't depressed, I was doing way too much all at once. And that my attitude was that I was a savior who was appointed somehow to rescue everyone, everyone I could, and that I would sacrifice everything to rescue other people. So that grandiosity was the key to understanding my state of mind.

And in therapy, we use some techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy where I would describe my perception of a firmly and consistently, where's the evidence for what you're feeling? Where is the objective evidence for what you're feeling? And I wasn't told that I was wrong. My first reaction when I was diagnosed was, are you saying I'm crazy? Are you saying that all my judgments are wrong? Are you saying my perceptions are wrong? That was upsetting to me at the time. The idea

that someone would say I was wrong, that really upset me. But she said, no, we're just trying to find out where the truth is. We're looking for that. We're trying to see if there's another side to your story. So she didn't want to dismiss what I told her. She just said, maybe there's another side. display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. What brings you then from this place back to New York and then back to working with kids, but in a different way? Well, I thought I would never go back to New York. And one day the therapist said to me, well, when you go back to New York, and I said, wait a minute, who says that I'm going back? I never said I'm going back. And she didn't comment on that. And she ended up being right.

It's a couple of years of having the same conversation again and again, but it slowly dawned on me that she was right and that I had to go back and that I didn't function well in situations where I was isolated. And that it wasn't New York's fault what happened to me. And that in fact, I had found my calling. I just didn't know myself enough yet so that I could sustain a life organized around that calling. So over time, in this mysterious, gradual way, I felt more and more strongly that I had to go back. I had to. Even if it was to go back and finish what I started and then leave again, I had to go back. I couldn't leave this as this ripped up life. So I went back and I went through five jobs in 15 months. I just kept quitting in a blaze of righteous anger and burning down every bridge behind me because I kept trying to rescue people.

I hadn't learned. Somehow I still hadn't learned. And then finally, when I stepped away from the last teaching job, these were all teaching jobs, all at the high school level, including I taught a couple of different courses for students trying to get their GED. So people who had left high school and were trying to go on with their lives. And I was helping them. And I still had as my agenda that I was supposed to rescue people. Well, I found out that those kids really didn't need rescuing. They just wanted to pass the test. So I had to think about what I loved about teaching. And it was that conversation. It was that correspondence. That's where the love was when I thought about it. What is it? Where's the happiness? Where do I feel like I belong? It's in that relationship, that correspondence, that mutual listening. That's where it is for me. And so I invited former students of mine,

those who had left high school, kids I taught in high school. And even now, some of them are old enough that they had their own kids and they had cousins and friends and they brought them too. I invited them all to meet me at first in my apartment in the neighborhood and then at a local pizzeria in the party room upstairs. And we would eat pizza and we would just write and then read our writing out loud to each other and listen to each other. And that's it. There was no judgment. Nobody was telling anybody what to write or how to say it. It was just, we were just listening to the substance of what someone was telling us and taking it in and asking questions so that we could understand even better what they were trying to say.

That's the whole goal. There's no correcting grammar. There's no stylistic advice, no judgments whatsoever about the writing, just listening and trying really hard to understand as best we could. And that was so popular. People kept bringing all ages and these two little kids, six-year-old and an eight-year-old, a sister and brother, whose father worked in the pizzeria as a delivery guy, they asked, what are you doing upstairs? And I told them, I said, we write and then we read out loud and we listen to each other. And then she said, can we come? So I said, yeah, come on up. So those two came and then their little friends came and we had this big group. It was too big for the

pizzeria. So we scouted for a spot in the neighborhood and came across this brand new building. Now at this time, Bushwick, which as the kids would tell you, has been a ghetto for a long time, was becoming gentrified. It was just beginning. And the landlords of this new building had constructed it where there used to be a parking garage, I think. And there was a room that was supposed to be a medical lab, but the deal fell through. And so we applied to rent that space as a classroom. And I was able to do that because two of my friends were in Hollywood at the time and they were prospering in a popular TV show. And so I told them what this group had been doing and that I wanted to open it up to the whole neighborhood

and all ages. And I thought something special was happening. And so they believed what I told them and put down a deposit that was big enough to allow us because we had no credit to rent the place. So, and that was 10 years ago. And that was after two years, two years in my apartment in the pizzeria, then now another 10 years in this classroom, which we're still in now. And all we did was write, read out loud, listen to each other, and talk about whatever came up as a result of what we had been listening to. And at around that time, my belief in that practice was deepened because one of my high school students was an alcoholic and she was also a brilliant poet.

And when she wasn't drunk, she wrote amazing poetry, truly a genius. But she was very much an alcoholic. And so I looked up where the local Alcoholics Anonymous met and I brought her to her first meeting. And when I was there, I was so moved because they were doing what we were doing. They would take turns telling their story and people would talk about it and ask questions. And that was it. And no one told each other what to do or commented on how they said anything. They just listened to each other. And I was saying, yeah. And this is not the exclusive property of alcoholics, this practice. I believe it's fundamental. it can be fundamental to education

so then i started applying for grants and got money and then i uh started recruiting volunteers some of them my my old high school students and then started advertising and online for uh volunteers so we got college students coming to help. And pretty soon it went from one day a week, one Saturday afternoon a week, to five, even six days a week of people coming to do this, to write and read out loud and listen to each other. And I was also influenced by having attended a Quaker prayer meeting where everybody sat in silence until somebody was moved by the Holy Spirit to stand and speak. And then everybody just listened to what they had to say. So we kept practicing that for year after year. And a friend of mine who's a well-known writer came and loved it and told his friends, you got to visit this place.

And so as writers visited us, I would read some of their, one of the books they had written with the kids. We'd read it together and talk about it. And then when the author would come, the author would read from the book and the kids would have a conversation and then they would write in response. And then the author would listen to the kids as they read their writing. So this was reciprocal attention. And for many of these writers, they'd never had an experience like that before. Usually people go to their readings, and they go because they know the author's work, and they want to meet the author, they want to hear them read out loud in person. This was different. The kids did not know who these people were. And it's not like they were disrespectful.

It's just that they had no idea who they were and they didn't really care about that. What they cared was, oh, this person wrote the book that we're reading. Oh, wow. And they're, you know, that was, it was interesting to meet them. So these famous writers weren't used to being greeted in this way and weren't used to being included in a reciprocal relationship where they would read and then the kids would read back to them. And so that conversation, again, is modeled on that ongoing correspondence I used to do with the kids at the high school. It's like, neither of us is inherently superior. Neither of us knows more than the other. We know different things from what the other knows, but we don't know more and we don't know better. We just know different things and we're trying to find our common ground. So you had winners of the

Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award coming to this small room in Bushwick and reading their work to kids who then said, thank you, that's interesting. I have some questions for you. And then wrote their own stories and the author listened to them. And this became a popular place for writers to visit. And I told the kids, this is like the old Muppet show where you would have celebrity guests and then at the end, they would present them with a Muppet that looked like them. And it just became, the Muppet show was a place where people wanted to appear. Celebrities wanted to appear. of different ways, by fundraising, by raising awareness, or simply by encouraging the children and receiving what they told them with respect and enthusiasm. Yeah. At some point, I guess it was 2016-ish then, where this takes on a whole other quality

also, where your universal rule is everybody is listened to. Yeah. The way we phrase it is everyone listens to everyone. Right. And in addition to that, you have sort of a bent to teach them about making the impossible possible. So you decide, well, we are going to take Don Quixote, written in old Spanish, which is very different than spoken Spanish. 400 years ago. Right.

And we're going to take these kids and spend maybe years translating it, but not just translating it into English, translating it. And it sounds like drawing from your experience with real people theater. Now, like, let's retell this story the way that you want it to be told in your world, in your language, where you're now the heroes,

you're the adventurers, and you get to create this universe. It's not just translating old Spanish into modern English. It's really, it's personalizing and retelling this thing. And this has become this years long adventure between you and the kids where you're, and even then turning around and going out and performing this in front of other people. Well, and I never thought I would do theater again

after the breakdown. I just couldn't handle the pressure. And so this started out as just a translation project. We're gonna take this huge novel and translate it collectively as a group, discussing every word choice until we reach consensus. And then as we did that, I thought, and the kids asked, well, this is all like a secret that we're keeping for us. And there was a desire to share the work with other people. And then I decided, well, we can, we can act it out. We can, we can stage this. And I,

they were excited by that idea. They were scared, but they were excited. And these were kids as young as six years old and as old as teenagers, all of them together in the same room, which had been a feature of the practice from the time that I started it after I resigned from the public school system to have all the ages working together, listening to each other. And we took this book and we're translating it. And the kids were so alive when they were translating and they would speak it out loud, which was just one step away from acting it out. And so we decided that we would do that so that we could show other people what we were working on. And then maybe they would want to join us or they'd want to help us in some way. And the idea became that we weren't just translating the book, that we were making the book a vessel for our stories. And I say our, because it's not just the stories

of the kids. It's primarily their story, but it's also the story of me and the kids together. Again, common ground. And that book is where we meet. We meet around the tables, facing each other, reading out loud together, and discussing word choices. And that's our common ground. And we work together towards a stage play, and it felt sometimes like words weren't enough. And so I called a friend of mine, a composer named Kim Sherman, a brilliant, versatile composer, all kinds of music, who I knew from Yale, and asked her if she was interested in teaching songwriting to this group of kids

and having the songs be based on Don Quixote and their translation of Don Quixote. And Kim was excited by the idea. And that was years ago I guess we're in our fourth year of the project now and writing a song takes that adaptation to a new level because you have to organize your thoughts densely and decide what matters most to you and what it is you want to say. Not only what the book says, but what do you want to say? So now you're going to sing. Why are you singing? Well, you sing because words aren't enough. You can't just speak it. You have to sing. What is it that you have to sing? What is that message? What do you want to say to other people? What do you want to say to strangers? What do you want to say to your family?

So those questions have to be answered when you're writing a song, because a song transcends the words and reaches directly into people's hearts. So you have to know what it is you want to say. So that's where the shift happened from we're translating this book in our own way to we have something to say, we have a story to tell. So that 400-year-old novel became the vessel for the stories of these children and their teacher, me. This old man in Spain in the late 1500s became a group of kids, Spanish-speaking immigrant kids in Brooklyn today. So, for example, there's a scene early in the book where Quixote interrupts the whipping of a child who has been hired to take care of some sheep. And the owner of the sheep is whipping the child because every day a sheep disappears. The kid cannot hang on to the sheep. So Quixote hears the cries for help and shows up

and stops the whipping and demands that the owner pay the boy what is owed for the work and let him go and stop whipping him. It's not fair. It's not just. The kids, when we read that part, said they know what that feels like. Not necessarily to be whipped, although sadly, as in any population, that does happen in some cases. But they understood the oppression. They understood the unfairness, the injustice, the fact that they were being scapegoated for a problem that wasn't their fault. They understood all of those things that are also the human nerves connecting to the political ideas of the day. When we started to write this, to do this translation and to adapt it,

it was in the final phase of the presidential campaigns in 2016. So the political shift in the country, I mean, it had never been easy for these families. It had never been easy, but it was suddenly becoming truly horrifying. And that was very much on everyone's mind. So when we read the scene in which this boy is being abused and is being exploited, not paid for his work and being scapegoated for a problem that isn't of his making. Everybody knew that this was their story too. So we translated it and then we had to turn it into dialogue. And there was dialogue already in the novel, but the kids shaped that and added to it and rearranged it until it spoke for them. So truly what you get,

and that's one example, but that's true of all the scenes in the play, you get the collaboration between Cervantes and these kids. That's what is on stage. That's what they show to people. They even have a scene in the play where they debate a word choice in translation. In the middle of that whipping scene, the abusive owner stops the action of the play. And I actually, I play that part. I'm the abusive owner in that scene. And I stop and I ask them about one particular choice in translation. And the group reenacts the debate that we had in class about that translation.

So we're showing people the pedagogy and the politics, you know, the egalitarian nature of the process, the reciprocal listening. We put that on stage as well. And the humanity, you know, like that underneath all of it. Yes. And the desire to rescue people. Because it's not just me and my bipolar grandiosity who wants to rescue people.

The kids have that same feeling. And I suspect that it's true of most kids, that they want to be useful. They want to help. They want to do something about a problem. I mean, my own children at home, my young daughters want to help. They want to know how they can help. It feels good to help. And the kids who I teach are the same way.

They want to be helpful. And so there's a refrain in the first song that we wrote collectively, a song that's called The Rescuing Song. There's a refrain in that song that says, can we help? Can we help? Can we help? It repeats that, that not please help us, but can we help? Can we help? Can we help? It repeats that, that not please help us, but can we help? So these kids who are living in fear, living in danger of being separated from their parents,

living surrounded by racist, xenophobic vitriol, hateful political rhetoric, living in danger, they want to help. They're not like, poor us. They're like, listen to what we're telling you. We want to help. We want to participate and make things better. And I admire them for that. So in the process, they're reading a book about a crazy old man who thinks he's a hero, who thinks that he's been placed on earth to rescue the needy and defend the defenseless, as he keeps repeating. They connected to that, not in a cynical or ironic way, not by saying, what a fool, but by saying, yeah, me too. I want to help too. I want to be a superhero. And so it's that angle that we take, that pure child hearted desire to help, to be a hero. That's the point of view of the play. And that's what I think

distinguishes it from the novel, even as we adapt the novel. It's that we don't mock the kids' desire to help. It's funny because these kids are hilarious. And the play is often really funny, but the humor comes from the children's refusal to give up, their desire to help, and their phenomenal resilience. The way that they can get knocked down by life and they keep standing up, just like Quixote does in the book. He spends a lot of that story lying on the ground, beaten up, bruised. And so in our play, we have those scenes where Kid Quixote, our hero, keeps getting knocked down and she stands up again. She gets knocked down. She stands up again. And if you ask the kids, they'll tell you that's what the story is about. You get knocked down, you stand up again and you keep going. So in the hands of children, in the voices of children, that message is no longer ironic or mournful. It's no longer a comment

on anyone's mental health. It's about a pure desire that is colliding with a world that is impure and that's sad. And then it's funny because the kids don't stop. So powerful. Yeah. If you were to look at the experience that you've had with Stillwaters over this last decade now and the work that you've been doing and what happens in that one room and has been happening day after day, week after week, year after year, and try and think about a word or phrase that would describe the essence of what goes on. Does anything come to mind?

Well, I can tell you the origin of the name of the school, Still Waters in a Storm. The same boy who named Real People Theater also named Still Waters. After we'd been doing it for practicing our writing and listening for the better part of a year, he said, this needs a name, this thing that we're all doing together, we need a name. So just like in Don Quixote, Quixote renames himself. He renames his horse. He reassigns his identity. So this boy wanted to do that for the group. And he wrote a number of possibilities on this sheet of paper and showed it to me and said, what do you think? And one of them he wrote, smooth waters in a storm. So I said, I like that. I can picture that.

And I said, if you change smooth to still, I think we've got something. Because there is an expression that still waters run deep. And stillness has a meditative air about it, that word of being still, not frozen, not paralyzed, but still at peace. And he told me that what that name meant to him was, in his stormy life, this was a place, wherever we met, the group became the place. This was a place of peace, a place where you could think and you could think together with other people in peace. So when I think about the aspirations of the group and the feeling, the one word I would say is peace. Not peace as in we're all so relaxed here.

Because if you walk in there, you will not see much stillness. The kids are in almost constant motion and they're talking and playing and laughing. But I think that what you experience there is true peace. I don't mean, I don't mean the, even though the meditative quality is part of the idea of the name, I think peace is not necessarily an absence of action. I think it's a faith that in this situation you are safe. And for children whose families are being persecuted. And for me as a person with a serious mental illness, we all need a place that is safe. And it's in safety that you can grow. In every sense, you can grow and you can become ever more beautiful.

And that's what we do for each other. We make each other safe. And our gift to each other is the gift of peace. And that is accomplished by listening and by the effort to understand. And all of that, to adopt the humble posture of listening, makes the peace possible. Because you're not in competition with anyone, and you're not struggling to control anyone. So if you're in a position of humility, of asking, of listening, of trying to understand, that brings peace. And that peace comes from feeling safe in that situation. And there's a verse from the Tao Te Ching, from Lao Tzu, that I paraphrase, that the reason the ocean can govern a thousand rivers is because it has mastered being lower.

So the ocean is below the rivers. That's why the rivers flow to the ocean. So if everybody begins by listening, then we flow down to each other and we gather in peace. I love that. It feels like a very good place for us to start to come full circle as well. So sitting in this container of the Good Life Project, if I professional practice the key to love is listening and

so a good life is one in which you daily practice listening i believe thank you you're welcome thank. This has been a pleasure. Hey, so people are always kind of asking me, what other podcasts do I listen to? What's really good out there? And one of the shows that's one of my go-tos is actually hosted by an old friend of mine, Jordan Harbinger, The Jordan Harbinger Show. And I got Jordan to come on and talk about one particular episode. Hey, Jordan. Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah, my pleasure. So you recently did this fascinating episode where it was just you, and it was called How to Ask for Advice. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Well, I started getting asked a lot for advice years and years ago. But most people who ask for advice, they're not really asking for advice. It took me way too long to realize this. A lot of people were asking for permission to do the thing they wanted to do, or they were asking for validation of their idea. They might say, should I start a clothing line? Do you have any tips? And, you know, I'd give them a real answer such as, oh, you should work in supply chain for a company that does clothing manufacturing, like Victoria's Secret. Work there for four years and you'll learn the failure points in the business.

And people would get angry with me for giving them that advice. Then I realized, ah, they don't really want advice. They want encouragement. They want validation. Some people do want advice and those people were getting lost in the shuffle. So I did a whole special on how to ask for advice. And none of

this will you mentor me type stuff, but very specific, intentionable, explicit, actionable advice, and how to formulate questions and get responses from people that might not normally respond. And I found this to be very helpful for my audience. Because I think if you do really want advice, you should be able to ask for it. But I think there's a lot of folks that need to realize that they're not really interested in advice and they don't need encouragement. So they should just go out and start. I think this is a good way to separate those two ideas. Love it.

And you can hear more about how to ask for advice and other episodes by checking out Jordan's podcast at jordanharbinger.com or find him as the Jordan Harbour Show on any podcast app. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you

discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold.

See you next time. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

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