The weight
Swans swim in the water and on the water at the same time. (Image by Peter H)
I keep getting asked how I feel about closing my school after ten years.
It’s a question I appreciate because it’s thoughtful and empathic. It’s also a question I have no idea how to answer.
On the last day of school, I felt the same bittersweetness I’ve felt on every last day of school. We enjoy the togetherness and camaraderie of what we’ve built together and the slight relaxing of social norms as the line between teachers and students blurs just slightly. The kids get a little sentimental and we all say nice things to each other. And then, the moment it’s time to go, they flee, leaping into the warmth and promise of their summer vacation without a look back.
Well...that’s all present tense. Should I change it to past tense now that there will never be another last day of school for me? Should I challenge myself to feel the enormity of that?
It’s enough — it was enough — to experience last Thursday as simply “the last day of school” as opposed to “the last day of the school.” To sing the White Stripes’ “We’re Going to Be Friends” together one more time, surrounded by friends. To look on with amusement as one of the seventh graders claimed a scale model of a skeleton as her own, decorated it with glitter glue, and named it Timothy, only to decide at the last minute not to take him home...and then, after she returned a few minutes later to grab a forgotten water bottle, walked out with Timothy after all. To cry happy tears at a meaningful note from a kid who made me feel seen when she said that I made her feel seen.
That’s all I need. The experiences and emotions I had this semester, particularly in the past few weeks, are enough to process. I don’t need to add ten years of weight to the top of that. There’s no room for it. It’s beyond the scale of what I can comprehend.
At the high school graduation of one of my former students this week, each of the twenty seniors was required to give a presentation. It was interesting to hear them share the earnest, heartfelt wisdom they’ve acquired in their short lives. They are making sense of the ending of one thing and the beginning of another. They are trying to understand what four years means — what their transformation into young adults has taught them. It is worthwhile to try to put it into words, but there’s only so much of it they can see from their vantage point. They don’t know yet what life will teach them, and several of the students acknowledged that very truth.
I could force myself to go through old photos and memorabilia from the past decade in order to grasp the magnitude of this change in my life. But didn’t I experience each year as it happened and let go of it as it ended? Didn’t I grieve each one already? I think it’s okay to simply move on, the way the kids stream out of the building when the day ends. “I was in seventh grade, and now I’m in eighth.” Boom. Just like that, the page turns.
I don’t know everything I’m going to do now that I’ve ended a project that has been my focus for ten years. I’m more like the high school seniors than the newly minted eighth graders in that I’m not sure what’s on the next page. But I don’t have to have those answers, just as I am not required to spend a lot of time processing what’s already happened. I can simply exist and notice what comes up.
The past has a weight like the news has a weight. Picking the weight up is often optional. Sometimes, doing so is soothing. Sometimes it offers a sense of control to hold onto it. Such a weight provides context and history. But sometimes it’s too heavy. We might feel lighter and freer without it.
