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My friend Annalise is a high school student. Where I live the students can become part of the town’s ambulance crew and go on calls during their school day. Annalise is one of them, and I, not a high school student by far, work on the ambulance two days a week.

The students run their own organization, create their duty schedules, and develop their own training classes with the help of adult advisors. On the days students are on call, they wear their uniforms, complete with pagers and day-glow trauma sheers. (aside: I am always surprised the trauma sheers have yet to be seen as a “weapon” in school. If any other kid in the school wore a bright orange pair of scissors on his pants he’d probably get expelled. But I digress…) Which students I get to work with on the crew is pretty random and I am always surprised in the morning when I check who is on duty with me. We run two adult EMTs and two high school students during the day, and if any of you have ever worked EMS, that’s a full bus indeed.

Two weeks ago Annalise was on the crew with me. It was early-morning and she was in her 1st-block English class. Her class’s assignment was to get a feeling of what peace felt like and write about it. In class, they were instructed to close their eyes, breath rythmically, listen to soft music, and think about their peace or what their peace was. Now, I am not a fan of public school, but I do take notice if a teacher goes a bit beyond their boundaries to give the students a different experience. I’m betting 100% of these kids have never contemplated trying meditation and this was a slick way to get them a different experiece of their waking state, be it in “English” class. They definately got an experience, but I don’t know if they took it all in.

Now, things started smoothly, the soft music and the intent of experienceing peace filled the room. Drifting, drifting, then Beep! Beep! Beep! Everyone is ripped from their la-la-land experience of peace as Annalise’s pager ignites it’s warble, cutting through the soft music. The voice of the dispatcher trails down the hall as Annalise dashes for the ambulance.

After our emergency call, the student half of the duty crew returns to school, retrieve their books, and check on what what they missed. When they are finished with classes, the kids walk across the street to the ambulance building and hang out with us until our shift ends at 6 PM.

At the building I jokingly asked Annalise how everyone reacted to their earlier experience of peace. Her friends from English said the teacher considered the excercise a failure. I was suprised. I said, “no, that experience should be taken literally, that was your experience of peace in the moment, pager interruption and all.” She thought for a second and I saw the lightbulb go on. She understood I was saying the intent of the exercise was to experince peace and write about it, and what they got was exactly their experience of peace.

It is like saying to self, “show me how I do peace.” Self then shows you quite matter-of-factly that you can maintain peace for a very brief time and then you create some distraction to pull you out of it.

But the outcome didn’t match the mind’s idea, its expectation, of how the event was supposed to play out, so the experience is rejected as a failure and the valuable information you were trying to give yourself is lost.

So now I’m going to give two realizations from this. First, some speculation on why the peace exercise was so short on peace. And I’m going to briefly talk about reflection, one of the tools that I hope you will use for the rest of your life.

Space and Expansion

Here’s what I think went on in the class exercise: Everyone got quiet and settled into their breathing and soft music. The mood in the room slowed all those minds down to the point where some space could open up. When space opens you get expansion, of self. And that expansion also will stimulate things that normally get no time in the consciousness (for a reason). Whether self is not wanting to see what’s there below the level of thought or the fear of the unknown that expansiveness can bring, everyone wanted out.

Annalise’s pager was a great manifestation for that. I doubt the students would stand up and say, “I’m uncomfortable, I don’t want to do this anymore” or “I’m bored, let do something else”. There’s way too many different social pressures, from both the peer and teacher levels, to disrupt class. So the pager going off was an acceptible way to leave the exercise.

A pager is but one way we distract ourselves. For the high schoolers, TV, text messaging, and video/phone games are the distractions of choice that I see. (And I want to note that none of these things are bad, you can do them all quite consciously if you choose.)

Reflection

The physical world is a reflection of self. You can gain all types of insight by seeing people and situations as a reflection of yourself (because it is).

Here the reflection is: when I go about finding my peace I interrupt myself instead of staying there.

To see the peace exercise as a failure, the students missed the message they were trying to give themselves. If the teacher let go of his expectations of how the excercise was to turn out, then the value of it could have been received by all.

Getting rid of the notion of failure or accidents or mistakes, we can learn a lot about ourselves and what we are creating in the moment. We dismiss entire experiences when they do not meet our expectations. If we don’t see reality as it is, our creative spark suffers, and we continute to create based on the filter we stick in front of our perception.

We are always supporting ourselves with a mirror held right in front of us. How often does that idea stay in our awareness when we are doing a task, working at our job, or interacting with people? We look at and remember our success in life, and if we gave the same attention to our failures, looking underneath what seems to be bad luck, we can begin steering ourselves down the path to being more conscious creators.