How do we end the things we love?

I’m thinking today, on the last full day of school and my last day as a teacher here at Jordan Small Middle School, about endings. How we end things is often an important part of how the things we do are remembered. The ending can color our memory. Its the most recent part of any ended experience. It casts a big shadow in our memory.

How do we end things? The things we hate we might walk away from unceremoniously. We might burn bridges or scream our anguish. Theres a catharsis in ending something painful. Theres a lightening of being that comes from being done with the thing that hurts.

How do we end the things that we love? I love teaching middle school more than I love most things. I love my students and my colleagues. I love the learning community I have been a part of. I love the sticky messy process of learning and I love the explosion of beauty at a concert. I love so much of this it swells my heart to make more room.

It felt wrong to end this year like any other year. Close the curtain, turn off the light and drive away.

How can I do that to the people who care for me, for the people I care for?

How do we end things that we love?

So often in our lives our endings are soft. People fade away as they grow apart, they’re presence fades until they are a kind of gossamer memory or a pleasing feeling somewhere in your chest. The person goes, the memory persists. There is no one moment that is the end until you think to yourself “ I wonder what X is doing” and then realize that it’s been so long that reconnecting would be like meeting a stranger. Your X is a memory. The real X has moved on. That love has moved with them and is now inside your experience like a ball of light, hopefully its in theirs too.

The shared experience, the time together, the discursive experience of caring. When we enter each other’s lives we create a new space between each other. Those relationships, those challenges we conquer that become the basis for understanding and action. Those things that make us up, begin to appear in that invented space between us.

Its that space that feels so lonely when you’re suddenly left alone. To me Its like being in a church sanctuary with all the lights off.

Theres a sense of potent space, but the people that make it mean something aren’t there anymore.

How do we honor that space between us, the care and connection, without being bound to it or stifled by it?

How do we end things that we love?

For me, because I am a teacher, I thought about this as a teaching question. How do I model someone who is leaving. How do I model being someone who makes a choice that brings them out of one community and into another. My students need to do this all the time. They change teachers every year, they change schools every 4 years. They change classes every hour!

How do I show them what I think it means to leave a community? How do I end this thing that I love? I eventually settled on: Honor the Time, Honor the People, Honor the Place and make sure that they know it. I try hard to honor the time I have spent here, the things I have built and the places that they have taken me. I try to tell the people with whom I have worked (students and staff) what they have done for me and what makes them special. Try to honor the spaces we were in together. Leave them better than when I arrived.

I try to show that in my actions. I am trying to end the thing I love, with love.

I hope I am successful.

I won’t get to know

I will be gone

I will be a memory,

a feeling,

I hope it’s a good one.