There are a few things you learn to ask people when you live with them, and one of the questions that tops my list is “Are you a hugger?”
My darling little sister—light of my life, thorn in my side—is a hugger to end all huggers. When she was in elementary school, my parents had to come up with a traffic light system so she would stop hugging strangers. Being less touch-aversive than my darling brother, a bullet point in my family job description is “must always be ready to accept a hug and/or snuggle.” I’m not going to say that I also now want to hug people all the time, but it is most certainly my default greeting or parting once you hit a certain friendship threshold.
Most of my housemates these days aren’t necessarily opposed to an occasional hug. However, one summer night, one of them popped off the couch, announced they were going to bed, and spread their arms wide. I watched in bewilderment as the other got up and hugged them goodnight.
“Wait,” I said, “you’ve been doing goodnight hugs without me?”
“We kind of started when you were on vacation,” one said sheepishly.
“Well, I want in.”
It’s now become a ritual staunchly woven into our house traditions, one that I never expected to have outside of my immediate family. The act itself is small, maybe two minutes of my day total, but it somehow rights the world. If I retire to my room early, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of guilt.
There are other rituals that have slowly crept into my days. Sunday afternoons are always reserved for family Zoom. Where everyone is has always been shifting (it’s one versus three Michigan versus Massachusetts these days), but it is rare when we don’t spend at least a half an hour detailing what’s happened this week or, in my brother’s case, saying that our lives are boring now that we are working adults and nothing ever changes.
Throughout college, Sunday evenings were reserved for my friend Elizabeth, when we struggle with Google Hangouts and recount our various thoughts from the week. Our FaceTimes have become more sporadic as I’ve slowly overcommitted myself and Elizabeth decided to work a fulltime job while also attending law school at Georgetown. However, we always end with prayer. She suggested it spontaneously the first time, but these days it is one of the places where I can count on God to show up.
When I became an online teacher, I had to navigate a part of the day that doesn’t really exist in brick-in-mortar: the passing period. As a teacher in a physical school, students walk in the hallways and trickle into your classroom, chatting with a friend or sitting in their desk to grab a book or a few more minutes to cram. Online, my “classroom” comes into existence fifteen minutes before I start teaching. Students trickle in, but instead of continuing on conversations, it’s like they are new babes in the world. Add on the reluctance to talk or type online, and you have the setup for an awkward time. It’s now on the teacher to create the passing period.
When I prep my lessons, I always include what I call a “share” question: something that I can fall back on when we’ve covered the weather and what we did this weekend to death. They range from would-you-rathers to hypothetical situations to get-to-know-you (my favorite in recent memory: if you were a hermit on a mountain, what would you give people who climbed their way to you?). They don’t always fly, and I don’t always remember to create a new one, but these fifteen minutes are often the best parts of my day—just chatting with students, remembering that there are real faces and hearts and minds behind the pixels.
This week, after this blessed fifteen minutes, I had to pivot and acknowledge the heaviness. As a teacher in Michigan, as a human living in a pandemic, as a person worn down by the constant grind of work, I had to take a moment and feel the weight of injustices that won’t seem to stop and that are invisible to me, only held in the hearts of my students.
I find myself able to bear this, though, due to these small rituals—hugs from a friend, texts from a sister, laughter from an unexpected comment—and the larger rituals looming—Advent, knowledge that though we are in the shadow of death we are also in the shadow of God, and a new year. The world will probably continue to spin into madness, and I know that I will not be able to stop it, but I am cradling these moments even so.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
