Aaron Urbanski: Article Trilogy

Over the past three years, our September 2025 author, Aaron Urbanski, has submitted three total pieces to En Root, as a part of a trilogy of entries that concludes with the final piece in our latest issue. We are so excited to share Aaron's past pieces that lead up to where we are today. Enjoy the entries below, and click on the titles to get access to the full En Root issues!

My Time as an Educator Wannabe

Saved in my files is this photo of a room. There are about forty wooden chairs, each with one arm containing a writing surface. Off-white walls, carpeted floors, a front podium, and windows through which I can see tree-lined ridges. This room is where I moderated one of my first college-level workshops.

I only moonlight as a teacher. I seek out generous instructors who let me join their classrooms to workshop topics I feel zealous about. I get this rush from helping others become emboldened by their experiences brought into accord with the ideas of others.

I first tasted this passion working as an interpretive ranger at a historical site with the National Park Service (NPS). I was a poor history student because my mind did not care about getting dates and names right. What I wanted, and what some of the good people in the NPS helped uncover, was to share the joy of how the past communes with the present.

This, I think, is why most people show up to a classroom. It is a timeless formula. Put forty individuals into those wooden chairs from my photo; gather forty people under the branches of an oak tree at a historical site; forty digitized squares on a video call can even get us there. The linchpin is the head of the classroom: the instructor, the moderator, the teacher.

When I advise students as an academic administrator, I often remind them the most difficult part of education is showing up. Being present anywhere is a complicated thing to achieve. In my decade as a member of educational communities, I aimed to help classroom leaders remember this. Their goal is to reward the people who show up. Have a script, arrive with the structure of your ideas intact, but remember that this might not be enough for those who arrive to share a space.

Inside classrooms, great happiness can be found from improvisation. I experienced this during a storytelling workshop I gave to an undergraduate interpersonal communication seminar. In this seminar, they had been reminded that world history is a patchwork of overlapping stories. My task for students was to try and guess who, from their group of classmates, was telling a specific story. They submitted short, personal stories to me before the workshop, and I read a few aloud in the classroom. One of the big takeaways – their reward – was in realizing it is not always easy to know someone through a story we hear about them.

I have another photo – this one not saved in physical files. It is the memory of my high school history classroom. The chalk boards were green and my teacher displayed handwritten notes on an overhead projector. Our quizzes asked us to recall names and dates from a textbook. My scores were often one or two correct out of five. I do not recall it being a classroom that rewarded me. Yet this place was almost certainly where my zeal for education was conceived.

Building vs. Destroying

“You have two minutes to draw a maze that takes me one minute to solve.” This is Dom Cobb, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, in the 2010 film Inception. He is speaking to another character in that film, Ariadne – who is a creator; an engineer. An architect.

Two minutes to make something. One minute to destroy something.

We were seeds once. We are mazes, too. Many of us took two minutes to create; most of us will never be solved. In his book The Triumph of Seeds, Thor Hanson nuzzles the idea of dormancy: the quiet pause between germination and maturity.

More from Dom Cobb: “In a dream your mind continuously…creates and perceives the world simultaneously.”

Our physical bodies, when dreaming, are typically dormant. Our minds, though, engineer all the fun. Dreaming while asleep is a confluence of building and destroying. Strengthening our immunity and collapsing our reality.

Back to Thor Hanson. “If seeds could not lie dormant, our entire food production system would be a folly.” Existing in a dormant state is often the complicated period between building and destroying. A time of waiting. An idea planted but a product unachieved; a brick removed and a building not toppled.

If this continues, I won't find myself in the present or past; I'll simply vanish in a wisp of smoke. This is a passage from a 2015 work of fiction by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. If seeds never leave dormancy, they will physically disintegrate. Sometimes, while we wait for something, the dormant period is agony. It can start to destroy truths. Even physically corrupt us.

Thor Hanson again. “Given time, evolution is much more likely to provide us with a multitude of solutions than it is to give us one ideal form.” Constant cycles of creating and destroying can build resilience in seeds and humans.

Back to Inception for one more second. This is Ariadne again, talking about building mazes: “Question is, what happens when you start to mess with physics?”. We can imagine an answer. Building and destroying can happen in minutes. Dormancy can feel never-ending…a time when reality teeters close to vanishing in a wisp of smoke.

We are architects of our truths; of our successes. Steering around prolonged stages of dormancy can offer a multitude of solutions as opposed to a singular answer.