The school year has ended. I have completed my 25th year of teaching and summer has begun. Believe it or not, while teachers are ecstatic about the school year ending and having some time off, there is a week or two of disequilibrium as they adjust to a slower pace. (Although it must be added that since summer is an unpaid “vacation,” some must continue a fast clip into a summer job.) Once you arise out of your stupor and realize you are free for a few weeks, you find yourself trying to accomplish every task you’ve put off for the last 10 months so that you can go back to work in August having accomplished something. At least that was always my way of doing things. But this summer is different! This is my endless summer because I won’t be returning to teaching in August. After 25 years, I have retired.
I was definitely ready to retire which is why I was so surprised by the feelings that presented themselves beginning on the last day of work. It wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined to just walk away. I felt like I was leaving a large chunk of myself behind. I had been part of my school community for 25 years, and suddenly I wasn’t. “But it was time,” I lamented. “I don’t want to stay, so why do I feel like this?”
The following day I got the worst cold I’ve had in years, and two days after that, painters sealed me inside my house for three days while they painted the exterior of my home. I felt so unsettled on so many levels. Part of me was anxious about this disoriented state of being, but the wiser part of me knew this would pass and that all was well.
After a week the mental fog began to lift, and I began slowly easing myself back into the pace of the outside world. Yet another week has now passed, and I am still not feeling that vibrant state of mind I remember before leaving work. Yet again I know all is well, and it’s okay to just let life flow and gravitate to what feels comfortable at this time as one stage of my life melds into the next.
We often think of life as a series of beginnings and endings, but it usually isn’t that clear cut. There isn’t a line that you step over from one stage of life into the next. It’s more like a cinematic fade-in from one scene to another with the time in between being fuzzy and unfocused. When this happens in a movie, we accept this lack of clarity trusting that the next scene will gradually reveal itself, but we are often uncomfortable when these fade-ins occur in real life.
These shifts happen over and over in our lives and come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they are happy ones such as graduation, getting married, getting a new job, or having a baby. Other times they are unexpected and unwanted, loss of a job, divorce, or the loss of a loved one. All are life-altering. The larger the shift the more it rocks our world and the more important it is to grant ourselves a time of transition, a time to honor and acknowledge where we’ve been and where we are going. It is a time to regroup, to say, “Yes my life is changing. It will be different, and I will be okay.”
I know that right now I am in the middle of one of those real life cinematic fade-ins as my life realigns itself. I have made a conscious decision to honor this place and to not be disturbed by the lack of clarity and focus. I have given myself permission to drift for a while following the currents of my heart trusting that all will be revealed at just the right time.