“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” This quote from Maya Angelou is one that resonates with me daily.
We come into this world a ‘blank slate’ upon which our life experiences write themselves. We learn how to navigate the world. We make mistakes. We get taken to task for them, or we get away with making them, thereby learning nothing except that we got away with it that time.
There are things in my past I would love to erase. Times when I was unkind or cruel. I try to remember them so that I don’t repeat them.
I consider myself a ‘nice’ person. When I am thoughtless and someone calls me out for being thoughtless, I don’t like it. It is uncomfortable.
But.
But.
It is a wake up call. And I need to pay attention.
We are living in ‘interesting’ times right now. If you are white, I urge you to think about how your life is different from that of a POC. While life may not be everything I hoped for, I know for certain that my life is not being made worse because of my skin tone.
As someone who strives to teach others a craft, I sometimes run into a student who gets defensive because I provide them with information they did not know. That challenged their assumptions. Instead of adding the knowledge to their information bank, they sometimes argue with me. They want ‘proof’. They want ‘citations’. I’m a weaver not a medical person. That doesn’t mean I can’t understand basic ergonomics and what will harm a body.
This past week I had a wake up call of my own.
With the new loom, I sit in a different position and the mechanics of the loom are different from the AVL. The Megado is a much taller loom and while I always did ‘perch’ at the AVL, the design of the Megado means that my old position was a little bit different from what is needed at the new loom.
My body has been abused with years of repetitive motions and I have injuries that need to be protected. So it happened that I began experiencing lower back pain. Nothing seemed to make it better, nothing seemed to make it worse. But I was in low grade pain for a while, treating with pain killers and anti-inflammatories.
A few days ago I was weaving on the Megado with the problem of this low grade pain simmering in the back of my brain. Sub-consciously I did a wee inventory of my body while I wove and suddenly I realized that I was not engaging my abdominal muscles.
Huh. I would have thought doing that simple ‘clench’ would be automatic but once I noticed that lapse, engaged the muscles, my back started to settle down. Not right away – of course not – inflamed muscles take a while to calm down. But that night I didn’t have quite as much pain. Over the next three days the pain slowly died down.
Changing attitudes about things like white privilege is like inflammation in muscles. You need to be aware of it. You need to consciously act to prevent it. You need to repeatedly address it.
None of that can be done if you continue to ignore the underlying cause and just treat the symptoms. Because pain killers and anti-inflammatories were only a treatment of the symptoms, not the cause of the problem in the first place.
When you know better…do better…