I spoke to a friend yesterday who is anticipating the end of a lengthy teaching career. Similar to most people who end a long-term career, she had mixed feelings. While she was looking forward to a more manageable pace of life, she knew she would miss many aspects of her career.
Life is filled with beginnings and ends, and more than likely those starts and finishes aren't abrupt but instead flow into one another in a more muddied way. Even if you leave a job, you simply don't leave all aspects of that job behind. I thought about that today as I cleaned up digital files--I still have many files left over from my teaching days. These are files that represent some of my best work as an educator so I'm hesitant to delete the files. What if I decide to teach again?
Yet, as we consider beginnings and ends, we have to think deeply about who we are and what takes priority in our lives. When we close one door, many other doors open up, and those new doors undoubtedly will take up significant time and attention.
It's difficult to let go of meaningful chapters and events in life, but that's what we do when we move on. It helps to capsulate those past chapters with an emphasis on the positive. Those capsulations provide a synopsis of valuable chapters in life while also giving us the space and time to move ahead into new chapters.
Life will be filled with beginnings and ends, and how we engage in each chapter and then move from one to another matters. Onward.