Even though we were contemporaries from the same state, I never heard of Travis Roy until a couple of years ago when I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Ohio and got distracted by a documentary on one of the screens on the wall.

Travis Roy was a talented hockey player who was paralyzed in a tragic accident in the first few seconds of his debut on the men’s ice hockey team at Boston University in 1995. Roy went on to graduate from BU and create a foundation for spinal injury research and support for spinal injury survivors. He passed away just a few days ago at age 45.

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There’s a tension that I experience on a frequent basis. It’s between the necessity of slowing down and allowing space for reflection and growth, and the reality that the clock is ticking.

I don’t do my best work dangling by my fingertips off of a precipice. I need to be peaceful, grounded, and safe.

And yet these are the same conditions that can lead to complacency — to doing nothing and letting the time simply pass by.

It is easy enough to fill a day with meals, laundry, and a walk in the fresh air — maybe a bit of bill-paying, family time, or creative work. And the next, and the next.

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One of the fascinating things about learning is that, once you’ve learned something, it’s difficult to see things the way you saw them before. A good teacher changes your worldview so profoundly that you can’t tell where their influence begins and ends — your thinking has been transformed forever.

At that point, it’s easy to dismiss the impact that the teacher has had on you. It’s understandable. As a teacher, I’ve come to accept this reality. Each student is an experiment of one, without a control group. Who’s to say whether things would have turned out the same without the teacher’s efforts? I think I made some kind of difference, but there’s no way to prove it.

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My father graduated from high school in 1965, a year in which (at least in southern Maine) styles were still decidedly conservative.

A devotee of Elvis and The Beatles, my dad felt stifled by the Eisenhower-era mores that still reigned and longed for the opportunity for greater self-expression.

So much so that he still recalls the indignation and outrage he felt less than two years later when, home from the service for a visit, he drove by his high school and saw kids with long hair, beards, and jeans. The injustice of it all! He felt it keenly on behalf of his sixteen-year-old self.

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