If a word summed up my career, it would be adaptation. My organization promoted and supported inclusion for all children regardless of ability, culture, family of origin and so on. The key to successful inclusion, in a nutshell, is the ability to adapt. If you can teach someone to be continually adjusting their teaching, environment, interactions to fit individual children, then you have essentially given them the tool to make inclusion work. Yes, there can be challenges but if your mindset is to look for ways to modify, you will usually figure it out.
All that is to say, adapting is an important value to me. I think we all learned some adapting through 2020 in everything that changed for us. At the farm, we got ducks and chickens and learned how to raise them from newborns. It has been a spiritual journey for me, to protect and nurture other living things. I needed that reboot, that adaptation, to pull me out of some of the isolation and anxiety I felt.
Now I am adapting again. I am learning the old skill of bread baking, specifically sour dough bread. It is a peasant bread, as one baker told me, but it is also a tricky bread. You have to practice to get good at it and you need to adapt, constantly, to its texture, temperature, flour and water. I have found it to be centering for me, much like watching the ducks or gathering eggs. As one person put it, animals live in the here and now and invite you to join them. Baking also connects you to nature, to earth in a very old way. As I adapt to new learning and experiences, I am finding myself more at peace with a world that often seems chaotic and random. Perhaps my farming husband has always known this; but for me, I had to change to find it.
