Trust and the flower pot

I have a flower pot on my dresser that I received as a gift when I was a junior in high school.  This is a story about how I got it and about the things I have come to wonder in recent years about what it means to me.

I took a class in high school called “Communications”.  It was a popular class, taught by a popular teacher.  This was the late 70s and I think it’s fair to say the teacher was an aging hippie and his class was definitely influenced by the spirit of the times.  Having been preyed up on as a child, I actually kept my distance from him.  I had a radar for adults who violated boundaries.  I had already worked to get switched out of a class where the teacher was known for smoking pot with students.  This teacher also had that reputation, as well as a group of much cooler girls than I who surrounded him.  Maybe there were guys too, I just don’t remember them as well.

I liked the class.  It was all about the ways we communicate with each other – pop psychology type stuff.  There was a retreat too.  We talked about issues like honesty, trust, you know. 

I think that on the last day of class we were supposed to bring a gift for one person in the class.   I think I brought something for a girl named Jill, someone who was much more popular than me in the complicated social order of the high school of 2000 kids where this took place but whom I had become somewhat close with over the class. 

I was very surprised when the teacher chose me, of all the students, to give a gift to.  He gave me a spider plant, quite a healthy one, with babies on it, in a small flower pot.  He said that he had had the plant and tended it for quite some time.  He said that he was giving it to me because of all the people in the class, he trusted me.  He trusted me, he said, not just to tell me something personal, like we had practiced doing with people in the class, but he trusted me in the way that if he ever wanted something done, I was the person in the class he would trust that he could turn to and that I would get it done.

I can’t begin to tell the value to me of this gift and of what he said that day.  I guess the fact that this plant, and after it was long gone the pot it grew in, stayed with me in every dorm room, home or apartment I ever had, made aliyah with me and still sits on my dresser 36 years later tells that tale.  In a high school of 2000 kids, in a life in which I felt often invisible, unpopular or unimportant, that gift and statement had a lot of traction and helped shape the positive ways I saw myself for many years to come.

And yet…

Some not so long while ago, something happened and a friend came to believe that I was not trustworthy at all.  As I reflected on this for some weeks, I thought about the flower pot, and I began to wonder about whether I had ever been the person the teacher said I was.  It seemed clear that :  the teacher wasn’t trustworthy, he was smoking pot with students; I wasn’t trustworthy – my parents couldn’t trust me and just the year before, for example, I had been stealing pills from the medicine cabinet of people I babysat for; the gift wasn’t trustworthy – what quality teacher singles out one student in front of the class to praise?  And years later, I didn’t feel like the person who could be counted on to get things done – I felt then, and often feel now, that I make too many commitments to too many people and can’t possibly carry them all out.  Sometimes it seems like the only way I can be trustworthy - to myself and others, is to cut back radically on what I commit to, and on who I am to others.  The more people expect of me, the more likely I am to disappoint.  Or something like that.

I would like to digress here to a story about a person I once met whom I think was named Lyn, but I fear if I go down that road I won’t get back to the present.  I'll save that story for later.

So….

Lately I have met two people who feel that the world is not a trustworthy place and that people in general cannot be trusted.  And I have found these people to be pretty hard or impossible to rely on.  Leading me to believe that how trustworthy we are may be connected to how much we trust others.  But beyond that, I have also noticed that my trustworthiness, my ability to follow through, help, stay committed, has been less than optimal when I have dealt with these people.  It is almost as though I have become less trustworthy when dealing with people who don't expect me to be trustworthy.  Or something like that.

So the flip side of this is that because my teacher said he trusted me, I worked all these years to be the person he saw me as.  I am not sure I have succeeded, but I believe I have tried harder because of what his words meant to me.  Which is something for each of us teachers to think about.

Many years ago, Reb Zalman gave me a blessing that I should see myself as G-d sees me.  This week, as we were studying Psalm 33, I asked my students if they believe in hashgacha pratit (that G-d oversees our individual actions).  One of my students said the following and I knew he had written the end of this story.  He said, “If people are created in the image of G-d, and if people see my deeds, then I believe some part of G-d sees my deeds.”  So I'm still grateful that my teacher in that moment saw, maybe not who I completely was, but who I could maybe become.  And that, with his shortcomings, he helped me get closer and work harder on being the person he saw I could be.