By accident...

Letters from The In-Between, No. 18

I have told the story of my life so many times that I stopped hearing what I was saying. Few Wednesday’s ago, I heard it, because it came out of my own mouth in front of a room of directors who run international schools, and I watched it land.

We were at the start of four hours together, and we began the way I always begin, with one thing about you that nobody else in the room knows. One of them said Montessori had never been anywhere in her plans. “I wanted to travel and cook,” she said, and then she found this work and never looked back. The next had wanted to be a police officer since she was a girl. Another told us how her family ended up in New York, which was not a plan either.

Then my turn.

“I’m a Montessorian by accident,” I said.

A little later, “I got a degree in psychology, and then, as one does with the psych degree, I ended up in marketing.” They laughed. I laughed. It is a good line. It has gotten that same warm little laugh for years.

When the Zoom ended I went out to the garden and sat down. The yellow hibiscus was open. A woodpecker came to the seeds and worked at them for a long time, unbothered by me, and I let my shoulders come down for the first time in four hours.

That is when the phrase came back.

By accident. As though I tripped and fell into a life I love. As though none of it belonged to me.

And the rest of them came back with it. A room full of people who run schools in different corners of the world, and one after another we had described the work we have given our lives to as something that happened to us while we were on our way somewhere else. Not one of us said, I chose this, and then I got good at it.

Let me tell you what actually happened, because I owe myself the truth, and because I suspect some of you are telling the same story about your own lives.

I came to this country at twenty one with fifty dollars folded in my pocket and a paper dictionary. I learned English from three children, ages four, six, and eight. I was their au pair for eight months, and they would stop me mid sentence, tiny and merciless, and make me say the word again until my mouth got it right. I can still feel the heat in my face, the frustration, the small fierce pride when a sentence finally landed clean.

That was a young woman deciding, over and over, in a language that did not yet belong to her, to stay.

And then the moment I always tell like a punchline. My son, six years old, buckled into the back seat on the way to his Montessori school, turning to me and saying, “Mom, you’re here all the time. How come you don’t work here?”

He had counted the hours I spent in that building and reached the only conclusion available to a six year old.

Here is what those hours bought, and I got to watch it work again on few Wednesday’s ago.

In the first hour I asked everyone to pick one real person, one conversation they had been avoiding, and to carry that same person through the rest of the day so nobody could hide inside a hypothetical. Then, before anyone was allowed to speak out loud, I gave them one minute of silent writing, because the first thing out of our mouths is almost never the thing we mean.

Late in the morning I asked one of the directors to read out what she had written in that first exercise, the one where you put down the story you are carrying about a person and then take out the word that makes it permanent.

She read her line. “This person will listen to me.”

Then she stopped. She was still looking at it, and I could hear her reading it back to herself. “It’s again about me,” she said. “How can I make it about her?” And she rewrote it out loud while the rest of us sat there. “This person will bring suggestions how to improve things.”

My entire contribution to that minute was mm-hmm. Not filling that silence is the hardest thing I know how to do, and it took me years to learn that the sentence I would have handed her is never as good as the one she finds.

None of that fell out of the sky. I built it, year after year, conversation after conversation, through mistakes you never saw and a thousand small corrections I made to myself the way those children once corrected me.

So why do I keep calling it an accident?

Because by accident is safe. If it was luck, I cannot be blamed when it wobbles and I cannot be too proud when it soars. I have been calling that humility for years. It stopped being humility a long time ago. It became a place to stand where nothing could be asked of me.

I grew up in communist Poland, where you learned early which sentences could be said at the table and which ones could not be said anywhere at all. I was seven or eight when my mother told me, in the family room, over tea and cake, about a relative of ours who kept saying out loud that the kamienica, the apartment building, had belonged to his family. This was a country where everything belonged to the government. He said it anyway, more than once. And then he was gone. Nobody knew where he had been taken. Nobody knew how. My mother did not put a lesson at the end of the story. There was no need.

So I learned to make myself smaller than what I knew. I carried that across an ocean into a country where nobody was listening for the wrong sentence, and I kept the habit anyway. The danger ended. The habit did not.

If you came to your work sideways, through the unpaid hours and the child who asked the right question at the right red light, you probably do this too. You say you fell into the thing you have given your whole heart to. And then you turn around and know, without knowing how you know, that the quiet teacher down the hall is not actually fine. That is years of watching people closely, and it belongs to you.

I have been teaching Future Scripting for a while and I have always pointed it forward. See it, write it down, act as though it has already happened. What I did not see until Wednesday is that it runs backward too. You cannot script a future on top of a past you refuse to own. The evidence has to be yours before the new sentence will hold.

So, the pen exercise. Three lines.

Line one. Write the sentence you use when someone asks how you got here. The whole thing, in your real words, the one you have said so many times it comes out on its own. Then cross out the word accident, or luck, or fell into, whichever one is doing the hiding.

Line two. Write what you actually did instead. The hours. The volunteering. The year you stayed when leaving would have been easier. Put in the numbers if you have them, because your nervous system believes what you write in detail, and it has been listening to the other version for years.

Line three. Write the sentence you will say the next time someone asks. Present tense. As though you have been saying it that way all along.

Mine, since I am the one who asked.

I chose this work. I was in that building for years before anyone paid me to be there, and then I got good at it. I am a Montessorian at heart, writer and a creator on purpose.

It came out stiff. I wrote it anyway. Write yours stiff too, and then write it again next month when someone asks you at a party, and again the month after that, until the true sentence is the one that arrives on its own.

The accident was only ever in the sentence.

With love and courage,

Magdalena

P.S. Put your three lines in the comments. I read every one. And if you are drawn to re-writing and re-scripting with me, and the community join the Courage to Create Academy.

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