One night, twenty minutes or so after putting my daughter to bed, I tiptoed upstairs to fetch a book from my bedside table. In the midst of writing an overdue essay, I did not want to wake her and risk having my studies interrupted. Half way up the stairs, I could hear singing. Her pianissimo voice was hushing a sweet lullaby version of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” I could tell by the softness of her melody that she was on the verge of sleep. My ears were pricked with attention, I could feel my heart pounding with joy over the preciousness of the moment, and my body became suspended in space. Everything seemed to come to a stop.

But my body twitched anxiously in response to my brain’s interrupting message: Go get the tape recorder! Where’s the video camera? Thankfully, I ignored my mind’s persistant nagging. Rather than dashing downstairs to fetch the video camera and returning to her door in the role of a removed (and breathless) observer, I simply made my way to the threshold of her room where I remained still, silent, absorbing each tiny syllable that she newly articulated. I felt alive, humbled, and in awe of her spontaneous performance.  I balanced on the verge of laughter or tears (I wasn’t sure which). I could feel my smile expand into my very spirit. It was an unexpected yet welcome moment of complete pleasure.

This moment of hesitancy of choice of action, between seeking the video camera or remaining to listen to my daughter sing calls to presence philosopher David Appelbaum’s concept of the stop, a moment of risk, a moment of opportunity. The stop, suggests Appelbaum, is an embodied moment that calls us to attention. “It is neither poised nor unpoised, yet moves both ways.” (1995, 15). It is a moment in which we pause, unsure of our choice of action, yet aware that we are now, as Maxime Greene might suggest, “wide-awake.” In that moment of hesitancy, we recognize our frailty, and in doing so the possibilities that await to engage us.

As Appelbaum writes:

To stop is to uncover what is in hiding, which is to say, to experience ourselves in hiding. Yet the stop means more. The stop opens and closes. It opens to an actual unfolding of a life event, that which lives on the other side of the hiding. (1995, 24)

In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt introduces her readers to the concept of natality, in which we are called to cast aside our habits of engagement, our expectations, and prejudgments: to hold and behold. Is it possible, in this moment of natality, that we may come to meet each other anew—a greeting which is simultaneously a moment of risk, a moment of opportunity, a moment of hope, a moment of longing—to engage wide-awake and welcoming? My coming to the threshold of my daughter’s song, my stillness in the listening, was a new possibility of embodied presence: an awakening to a new way of engagement that calls me to attend to what matters.

I was in that moment of hesitancy torn in my newly attained and seemingly conflicting roles as a mother and researcher. In counterpoint to my initial inclination to record, to document, to capture the evidence, I yielded to my heart’s desire to listen, to be present to every new syllable my daughter uttered. This new sound brought to presence a gift, an awakening to those habits of engagement that limit my horizons, even as my daughter lulled herself to sleep.

In that instance I realized that I desire and actually need to stop more often in this way in order to be present and intimate with my daughter, my family, with those with whom I spend my time at work. And, in that instance, I also realized that if I could learn to choose to listen for and welcome the moment of the stop during my research and studies, similar experiences such as the one described would invite me into a richer and deeper spiritual space of knowing and compassion.

So, what then does welcoming the moment of the stop mean? The word “welcome” comes from Old English roots of “pleasure” and “guest” and the word “come” is also derived from another Old English word “cuman” which includes the word “gemu” meaning “to be born.” If one were to playfully patch these bits and pieces of definitions together, along with the etymology of “guest” which also includes “enemy” or “stranger,” then perhaps it is possible to acknowledge that the action of welcoming the moment of the stop includes welcoming with hospitality all guests who are pleasantly or unpleasantly, expectedly and unexpectedly, and instantaneously born into the moment. As Derrida (2003) invites us into the space of hospitality, he reminds us that,

Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other. (128-29)

Coming to such an understanding reawakened in me the notion of letting go, of accepting interruption, in my scholarly and parental journey regardless of how welcome, or unwelcome, the unforeseen guest could be: my daughter awakening unexpectedly from her nap, an understanding, a misunderstanding, a shadow—the darkness of worry, anxiety, and control—a contradiction. It was time to invite and embrace that which I could not plan or predict into my academic or domestic adventure.

Coming face to face with the demands of my daughter’s needs in the midst of research has taught me so. It is a surprise and relief to have my daughter present me with a new way of knowing myself in all facets of my life. No amount of book knowledge could have taught me such a powerful lesson.

Intellect’s light sees but is powerless to do. The body’s light sees and is able to do. (Appelbaum, 1995, 121).

Reflecting on the entire experience of new motherhood and academia, as I struggle to balance the demands of parenthood with scholarship, has helped me to realize that as a student and teacher, as a parent and learner, inevitably, one must venture into uncharted territories—to risk loss and entertain new possibilities, to swim in certain discomfort—in order to improve, change, and transform one’s teaching living self.

It is the stop, an awakening in the presence of new possibilities, and the welcoming of unexpected guests that calls us home to ourselves and those we love. In the presence of my daughter’s singing, and my learning to become a researcher, I have come to understand that it is in the stop, that we learn how we engage in inquiry with one another. Being in each other’s presence is what matters in the intimacy and vulnerability that is education.

We now welcome you, invite you, our guests, to Educational Insights’ publication of Notes from the Field: Investigating Our Practices, a selection of action research articles written by teacher researchers, all members of a Master of Education cohort based in Chilliwack, British Columbia.

We share with you our vulnerabilities and our celebrations in the learning that we have done together over these past three years. As we have inquired deeply into our teaching selves, stirred up, and, in essence, welcomed that which needed to be challenged in our practice, we hope that you, too, will welcome that which comes to you unexpectedly or pleasurably in this space.

Christine Schaufert & Lynn Fels
July 31st, 2007

References

Appelbaum, D. (1995). The stop. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Arendt, H. (1998) The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Greene, M. (1978) Wide-Awakeness and the Moral Life. In Landscapes of Learning. New York: Teachers College Press. 42-52.

Philosophy in a time of terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. (2003). [interviewed by] Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.