A Deep Sigh (#1)

I am going to use this Labor Day weekend as an excuse to take off a week from blogging. It is perfect time to reevaluate, and readjust the direction my thoughts and writing are taking me. I should be back a week from today with something more substantial (i.e., an actual plan and not just dreams). In the meantime, I present you a terse examination of my emotions surrounding this holiday.

(Edward Hopper strikes again. I feel that there is a strong connection between that woman and today's post.)

Throughout my childhood, Labor Day weekend marked the transition from the carefree, unsupervised, lazy days of summer, to the structured, mentored, busy days of school. And when I started teaching, that transition itself stretched out across a week of setting up and planning out the new academic year. But whether I was a student or a teacher, it was always a special moment: a breath, inhaling hope and exhaling possibilities. It was an opportunity to start fresh: reject bad habits and embrace new ones; forgive past transgressions and avoid future ones. The electricity was always real: a row of sharpened pencils lined up on a desk. The potential was always present: a new composition notebook begging for content. 

However, the outcome was always the same: I would come up too short of my initial goals. Falling behind early, I would end up scrambling throughout the rest of the year, just to stay afloat.

But after forty-two years, I think I figured out my mistake, well one of them, anyway. My expectations were way off. I wanted to conquer the mountain and claim the summit for myself without the hard work and risk such an accomplishment requires. The importance of planning and patience were outside my grasp. I should have started by training myself with walks through the neighborhood, followed by longer hikes along the edge of my comfort zones. Then planning my route across the plains into the foothills, which must be traversed before reaching the base of the mountain.

So, with some wisdom in hand, I began acquiring, over the past few years, new habits and greater knowledge by taking smaller steps and doing better research. Since the beginning of this year, using these skills and insights that I patiently amassed, I grew as a person. Now, I believe I can harness that spark—the one that kept waxing over the Labor Day weekend, only to wane by Halloween—and channel it into a more productive and successful year.

Because, for me, there will always be that incredible flare of energy as summer shifts into autumn. It is in the air: the earthly smell of grasses begging to slumber; the slight chill carried on an early morning breeze; the rustling of fading leaves on aching branches; the longer, darker shadows at dusk; and the loss of heat as the sun slips closer to the horizon. It greets me when I wake, winks when I begin to tire, and sighs as I crawl into bed. 

But before caving into a winter slumber, before surrendering, there is this moment when my mind and body sync, and I am inspired to harvest what I can, process it and store it against a future famine. In years past, I was never able to take advantage of this momentum, and focus it.

However, this time things are different.

This time, I am the one who has changed.

And that makes all the difference.