Lessons Learned From A Broken Hip

Nearly a year ago, I fractured my acetabulum. I had run a school for years without knowing that word existed. For a few weeks, it became the only part of me that anyone seemed to care about.

 

The accident itself was not dramatic. I was standing. Then I was not.

 

For a while, I got around campus in a wheelchair, which is a different way of saying I ran a school of six hundred girls from a sitting position, unable to open most of the doors in my own building.

 

I spend most of my working life focused on the things that keep a school like this one standing: budgets, contracts, enrollment, and the endless details of who is responsible for what. It's real work, and it's necessary. What I had never had occasion to consider, until I was wheeling myself down a hallway I normally crossed in nine strides, was that none of that machinery had much to do with how a school actually runs on an ordinary Tuesday.

 

The Montessori students found me almost immediately. Very calm, very serious. They formed a circle around my chair and looked at me with the focused attention of people who had identified a situation requiring clarification. Their unanimous question was whether I was okay. Their method was textbook: observe, identify the anomaly, approach without alarm, determine whether the adult was fully operational. I am, on most days, the person whose office is supposed to have the answers. It did not matter at all. They decided what happened next, and what happened next was that I got looked after.

 

It kept happening all the way up the building. Toddlers checked on my hip with remarkable consistency, as though it were an ongoing matter deserving periodic review. High schoolers slowed their pace without a word. Colleagues who, organizationally speaking, reported to me held doors, carried things, and quietly rearranged their own schedules around mine, so naturally that I often didn't notice until later.

 

None of that was in anyone's job description.

 

At Visitation, we have an old name for itꟷolder than any budget line or contract I read for a living: the Little Virtues. Patience. Gentleness. Thoughtfulness. The habit of noticing another person's difficulty before they've had to name it. None of them appear on a balance sheet. Yet for that month, it was the only thing in the building that truly moved anything.

 

A year later, I still spend most of my time on the work that genuinely matters to keeping a school healthy and functioning: finances, contracts, decisions about who is responsible for what, and making sure we can fulfill our mission. A school that can't pay its bills or keep its agreements doesn't survive long enough to be kind to anyone. But I was given a month to see what a place runs on when none of that is available to you. It runs on people deciding, without being asked, to make things a little easier for the person in front of them.

 

Budgets and contracts keep the doors open. The people who walk through them—and the virtues they practice every day—are what make Visitation, Visitation.