Clearing the hurdles
Is it a blessing or a curse? Yes. (New York Public Library)
Today will be the first day that students and teachers at The Little Middle School have had the option of attending school mask-free since March 13, 2020.
I expected to feel excited about that, but instead, I feel a sense of peace and calm. I know that there may be mask-required days in our future, and I am emotionally prepared for that.
For now, life feels a tiny bit easier. When I'm walking into the building with my hands full, I don't have to stop, put everything down, put my mask on, and then pick everything back up again. I can just punch in the door code and go on in.
When I sit down at the computer and put on my special glasses, they won't fog up.
When I look around the room, I'll see the faces of many of the people I've spent so many hours with — not just their eyes.
Yes, it feels like we've cleared a hurdle. I'll feel the same way when I finish writing this blog post and publish it. Another thing accomplished. Another task checked off the to-do list.
A lot of the projects I've put so much work into will be winding down in the coming months. The Bootstrapper's Workshop ends in a few weeks, the Little Middle School's final semester comes to a close at the end of May, and The Marketing Seminar wraps in June. The Carbon Almanac was shipped to the publisher this week and will be released on the day of the summer solstice.
I could be forgiven for believing that things will be easier as the days go forward. But I have no idea. School teachers just like me who happen to have been born in a different country but are picking up assault rifles and fighting in the streets. A week ago, that would have been unimaginable; now, it's just the way things are. We never know what's going to happen, and that phrase sounds a bit more ominous after the past two years that it used to.
However, even though I know that the pleasure of completing a project or resolving a problem can never be guaranteed to mean the beginning of ease or the end of troubles, I do enjoy and appreciate these transitions on their own terms. Because we don't know what's coming next, these shifts in focus are necessary to help us prepare for whatever's next. One door closes, another opens.
I'll admit to having a lot of doors open right now. New ones, opening to welcome new opportunities before the others have closed. But it's interesting: I've said yes to a few projects that have been a bit slow to get started, as though they are waiting for me to be fully ready. There is no rushing or pushing — they're on their own timeline, not mine.
In that way, the challenges of life are like meals: You can't consume all of them at once. You have to take them individually, digesting each one fully before you dig into the next.
How fitting, on this first day of the Fast, to talk about clearing hurdles. Going without food or water from sunup to sundown each day is a challenge in itself, and each day — and sometimes each hour of the day — feels like its own accomplishment. Whatever ease I'm granted by having a light schedule and no mask today will probably be erased by the difficulty of experiencing many hours of hunger.
A few weeks ago, at the height of the Omicron wave, I was musing on (or perhaps whining about) how the tests and trials of life always meet you exactly where you are. They never get easier. We just keep finding our way into new opportunities for growth, some of which are chosen and welcome, and some of which are decidedly not.
It's enough to make you want to give up and become what one of my former students called a human burrito, wrapped into a blanket and hiding from the world except as it appears on your smartphone screen. Unfortunately, however, only a limited amount of burrito-ing is really possible for us grownups. We have to face our hardships and address the obstacles that confront us. And though there will always be more hurdles to leap over, we can still take a moment to find satisfaction in the hurdles we've cleared. Then, it's on to the next one.
