arrivals & departures

It is the end of the school year. 

In fact, next week at this time we will have held our closing exercises and the class of 2019 will be on the brink of whatever comes next. Yet those graduating students are not alone in their new adventures; for each student experiences a moving up and a moving on. 

It is a time of arrival.

And it is a time of departure.

I wrote earlier this year that many things can be true at once, and this echoes through my heart at this time of year.

I am reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh entitled Work: How to find joy and meaning in each hour of the day in which the author describes the nature of mindful walking. He writes,

"Bring your full attention to the contact between your foot and the ground. Breathing in, you make one step with your left foot. You can say to yourself: "I have arrived." This is not a declaration; this is a practice. You have to really arrive. "Arrive where?" you may ask. Arrive in the here and now. According to this teaching and practice, life is only available in the here and now. The past has already gone. The future is not yet here. There is only one moment when you can be truly alive, and that is the present moment. When you breathe out, you make another step with your right foot and say, "I am home." My true home is not in the past, not in the future. My true home is life itself--it is in the here and now. I have arrived at my true home; I feel at ease in my true home. I don't need to run anymore."

Perhaps, like the Zeno's paradox of the arrow (in which he questions whether an arrow in flight actually exists because it is either moving into, or out of, a space and, therefore, is never actually in a place because you can't pause it's movement to identify its location) Thich Nhat Hanh is onto something compelling, something that can tether us to the relationship between ourselves and the earth, between time and place, between what's just been and what will be.

I am leaning into the arrivals and the departures of the school year, of summer, of my relationships with my incredible students. I am aware of the departure of beloved friends and colleagues and of the loss of innocence, of feelings of security and feelings of vulnerability.

In all of it, though, I am going to resist the urge to speed up.

Instead, I slow my cadence and whisper, even in the departing.

"I have arrived. 

I am home."

We cannot change our circumstances, we can only choose the role we play in the moment we're living.