Permission

I had to give myself permission to take the summer off from blogging. 

My incoming seniors all need to give themselves permission to learn; they also need to give me permission to teach them, and themselves permission to listen, to admit they are not finished, ready to leave, to come out of the oven. 

Only those who give me--and themselves--permission will learn.

We must give ourselves permission to fumble, even to fail if we are to succeed and to do exceptional things.

My son has given himself permission to be humbled and shaped into a United States Marine; he has given the Marine Corps and all those above him permission to do whatever they feel they must to shape him, to make him into the man he will become, the Marine he must become.

He did not need to ask our permission to go, to join. 

My publishers need to give themselves permission to take risks in the face of all the challenges their industry faces; those who do not will perish.

If I am to be a great teacher this year, a good parent, a good husband, and whatever my readers and people on the EC Ning expect me to be---I must give myself permission to disappoint, to divert attention from one area to another as needed.

Permit, the root from which the word comes, means to commit, to hand over, from Latin permittere, from per- ‘through’ + mittere ‘send,let go.’

Thus, I must let my son go, must ask that my students in some sense commit themselves or hand themselves over to my care that I might teach them this year those things they have given me permission to teach them. I give myself permission to learn from them, to admit that I myself am not complete, that I do not know everything, that we are here, in this class, to learn together what we need to know if we are to live well and contribute to the world we must give ourselves permission to care about, to claim as our own.

Comments

[Dana Huff]

I'm working on giving myself permission to say no. It's hard.

[Stephanie Griffin]

Thank you for writing about this simple, but often overlooked, and very necessary concept. Your blog posts are practical, accessible, full of wisdom, and inspirational. Thanks, Jim.

[Clix]

Yay new school year! Isn't it exciting? I'm excited!