Summer is awesome, isn’t it? A time to step back from the frenetic pace of teaching to enjoy time with family, to catch up on everything you’ve put off during the school year, and time to invest in yourself.
For me, it’s always a really tough time too. You see, about 12 years ago, on a walk with my youngest daughter (she was a baby at the time), I was stung by a bee and subsequently ended up on an operating table getting epinephren to the heart (yes, alla Pulp Fiction). The story that led up to me going to the hospital is quite a funny one which really needs to be told orally–by my husband (Coles notes version: suck it up, eat your sandwich, fine we’ll go to the pharmacy, ok maybe we’d better go to the hospital). He felt terrible about it all when he found out that I could have died if we had waited any longer; we had no idea I was deathly allergic to bees. Truthfully, if I had been stung a few years earlier when we were about 3 days away from a hospital via canoe, I wouldn’t be writing this today.
So you can see that as much as summer is an amazing time to be outside enjoying all that nature has to offer, it is also pretty scary Even with a double epi-pen, I’ve got about 40 minutes tops to get to a hospital.
I could spend most of my time inside in order to prevent getting stung, but then I weigh the risk with the benefits. I would miss out on BBQs, lunches on patios, hikes, and much more. I have to remind myself that I hadn’t been stung for most of my life, that the likelihood of being stung is not too high.
I’m not going to a bee farm any time soon, I do need to figure out where the nearest hospital is in proximity to me, and I still panic like crazy when a bee flies very close to me, but I’m not going to let my fear prevent me from enjoying the great outdoors and making great memories with my family and friends.
It’s kind of the way I approach life now. I don’t take stupid risks, but if I think there is benefit to something, I swallow the fear and try it. I don’t let the miniscule potential of things going wrong get in the way of what can be amazing.
What if we approached everything in life and in teaching this way? What would be different?
