Timelines...

Dear Maria,

Seems impossible and unforgiveable not to mention the death of Robin Williams. The comments from friends and family—so personal, this communal sorrow—expressed so eloquently the shared loss. Almost as if the moon were no longer in orbit.

What more do we need to learn than that today there are the individuals who share our world with us and tomorrow that may not be so. Fragile beings we are, and all us with no certain future here save our mortality.

Fortunately, I still had as a defense against the gloom the memory of an afternoon with two students—both wonderfully bright and thoughtful and articulate—who spoke to a sense of being on a timeline for reaching certain milestones. Each felt the markers ahead that would define their lives. Completing college, getting on with a career—which for these young women will most probably come to fruition.

Of course, I spoke to uncertainty, that life would come as answers to questions that may never be voiced. My trump card was the same one I always toss onto the table—not becoming a high school teacher until I was 27.

That autobiographical note perhaps speaks more to my lapses in judgment or a lack of direction, but even so I claim it also makes the larger point that life may not be a series of dots connecting.

The past few weeks, Max has decided that we should move our morning walk closer to sunrise, and this morning after the high school bus chugged through the neighborhood and as the first light touched the treetops, off we went. A slender hawk has become our morning herald as her shrieks begin at dawn. I watched crows fly at her to ruffle her feathers, but she held fast to her limb and continued her shrill cries.

Max never lifted his nose from the ground, and the elementary schoolchildren gathering on the corner were too stunned to care either. And so all that human energy that must be expended to push through the first day back in the classrooms is unleashed yet again. Clocks and bells and calendars to the forefront for so many of our friends, our colleagues.

For me, after two mugs of coffee, Max’s low growl from the foyer and the hawk’s morning call are enough to set the day in motion.

Be well, and may what unfolds only bring goodness into your world.

Yours, srk