walking into the dark

I finally ended up cleaning my classroom and moving all the furniture to prepare for the annual carpet cleaning. I kept putting it off partly because those bookcases are heavy! But it’s also another confirmation that this school year is actually over. The classroom was pretty much frozen in time from mid-March when quarantine started. Paper snowflakes still on the windows, our last math lesson still on the board, so many unread books piled up on my desk and cobwebs everywhere marking the passage of time; the absence of activity.

Well, I got some help moving the heavy bookcases and I vacuumed all the cobwebs. I boxed up the students' things to send home and I’m finishing their progress reports. It’s time to let go. It’s okay to let go. It’s hard to let go and it’s okay that it’s hard but somehow it seems a bit harder when it’s so uncertain what will come next. I know things will be different, things will change, but I don't know how.

It reminds me of another time I was approaching this same kind of unknown transition when I was about to move back to the US after living and teaching in Costa Rica for 2 years. The little town where I lived and the families that lived there had become like home. It seemed impossible to leave and yet I knew it was time to leave. I just had no idea what was going to come next. Right before I left I had a very memorable walk home that taught me an important lesson. 

I had just left from visiting one of the families in my town and was walking home under the dim light of a new moon on a dark mountainside road. There was this one turn in the road, a particularly dark corner with no houses or streetlights. This tall corner of the mountain loomed frighteningly dark, no curves or forms visible in the blackness as I approached. I generally consider myself pretty fear less but something about this corner gave me chills. But then as I approached, my footsteps echoing, my eyes started to adjust. What at first seemed an impenetrable blackness was suddenly only a very dark grey. Suddenly it seems there was some light that I hadn’t noticed before and then before I knew it I was on the other side. 

And that's what these moments of unknown transition feel like. As you're approaching it seems impossibly hard and dark. "How will I find my way through? What's waiting for me in that darkness?" we wonder. But we approach and enter, step by step. Our eyes adjust and we're able to see light that we couldn't see from a distance. And then before we know it, we're on the other side.