Don’t Fear the Grinder
It’s time to embrace being ground up!
Today I found myself procrastinating and reading the Jone’s Brothers Coffee website. Such a bizarre series of twists and turns led me to this Amsterdam coffee maker’s website that, looking back, I know it couldn’t have been pure chance, but instead the spirit of possibility guiding me. Before I knew it, I found myself on a blog post from 2016 with a photo of sprouts breaking through soil full of nutrients from coffee grounds. Mesmerized by the image, I wondered what those sprouts were up to now as we rapidly approach the third decade of the 21st century.
It’s hard to believe sometimes. The third decade of the 21st Century! I hope that everybody is ready for the 21st Century because it’s going to be different–really different. Even though no student enrolled in a K-12 institution has ever lived in a different century, we still talk about preparing them for the 21st Century. When is the expiration date on that? How long until a thought leader stumbles upon the idea of building students for the 22nd Century, which ought to be fun, but I bet really different too!
One of the things that we don’t spend a lot of time getting students ready for is the grinder. I contemplated that those sprouts wouldn’t be sprouting if the Jones Brothers hadn’t ground up some delicious Arabica coffee. I realized that I’ve been spending way too much time and energy resisting the feeling of being ground up by life and the new norms of work and political culture. Maybe I could learn something from the coffee grounds and the sprouts! As we prepare for the coming of Generation Dystopia, perhaps we should learn to embrace the grind! I’m going to stop anticipating the pain and loss of being ground up (down?), and start embracing the opportunity it gives me to sprout up in a new direction.
So don’t fear the grinder, just concentrate on the little sprout that you might become! And never forget, it could be worse.
