Endings: The Beginnings of New Possibility

I woke up this morning and I did not have to rush off to school.  I almost enjoyed being able to wake up according to my body’s natural rhythm, and not the alarm of my phone, but grieving the fact that my class of 20 rambunctious, loving and creative kindergarteners were all at school without me dulled it. 

Today has been looming over my head for the past two weeks.  Surplussed, it hovered like a pregnant rain cloud.  The idea of it always there hanging, during outdoor play and arts and crafts and conversations at the gate with parents during pickup. But it never burst, and for a little bit everyday, I think part of me was beginning to think it might just float away.  

Of course it was a beautiful blue sky on Friday when I packed up the last of my things from my classroom home the last two years.  

Now boxes of laminated letter cards, folders of worksheets, and bags of puppets and storybooks line the floor of my garage.  I am no longer a kindergarten teacher and yet I can’t bring myself to put them away.  

I’ve always hated endings.  Of everything I feared as a child, from monsters to clowns to sleeping in the dark, endings have been the one fear that has lingered.  Its why I slow down reading a good book once I pass the half way mark, not wanting it to be over.  Its why I still play Christmas music on January 3rd, and don’t unwrap my last present until a week after my birthday.  Its why I needed months of therapy after my first pet died and why my last relationship ended two years after it should have.  

However as much as I fear endings, I am learning to embrace the beauty that is beginnings. 

Starting over, new paths, un-tread territory,  and unwritten pages.  

Its rather something that two opposites can coexist so peacefully,  moreover, symbiotically. 

Without endings, there would be no beginnings.  

My kindergarten position at the school I have been working at since I was hired at the school board has ended. But now, I have an entire new realm of possibility at my feet. 

I can point my toes west, and teach a grade 5 class, or travel north on the Yonge Line and teach grade 1 at a school with a cherry blossom lined drive.  '

I can get on a plane and fly into another time zone to teach in the mountains that have been calling me since the summer I spent there in 2018. 

I could teach virtually and pursue my yoga teaching career more full time.  

Wherever I go, I will be among new people, and able to forge new connections.  I’ll meet students that fill me with new joy, hear new stories and become part of new happy endings.  

I will walk down hallways which I don’t know where they lead.  I’ll get lost looking for staff rooms I have yet to enter.  I’ll plan units and book field trips with teachers who might become friends whose names and faces I’ve yet to meet.  

The beginning is a wondrous place.  I’ll take wrong turns, make mistakes, wander down some dead ends, but its okay, because I am at the beginning.  I am not supposed to know what’s around the next corner.  That is the beauty of it. 

All I have to do, is start.

xoxo Jordan