Between reading about what binds us together and what can separate us too and how those converge to form the most audacious dreams I want for myself, I present this:
From now on, she decides, she will be showing up to every single moment in her life with truth and love and joy and grace.
She is going to live with truth and love and joy and grace in a way she never has.
She makes this decision because she finds a book.
Really, she found a diary from when she was in high school.
It might as well have been a book or kind of a sacred text,
the way she recalls carrying it around and referring to it and
revering it as she once did.
This is a book of memory.
This is a book of her memories.
This is a book of truth and love and joy and grace, which are all attributes the adult version of her seems to possess in limited supply.
Finding this book stuns her because
she cannot imagine ever having possessed so much of each trait.
Finding this book stuns her because
she was once willing to return to its pages again and again and again for consultation on matters of the soul, mind and heart.
Which means: she once trusted herself, her own logic, enough not to need the approval of others or not to feel so conflicted at each decision.
Which she doesn’t anymore.
Finding this book stuns her because
she feels as if she is meeting herself for the first time, a younger self so self-assured and able to dream the most audacious hopes for herself.
How does one lose all of that confidence?
Finding this book, this text, these memories, these truths, these self-assured words makes her wonder about her own students.
What they have now
And what this world will force them to lose
Her heart is heavy with each and every single way
that she never seems prepared to fully address the things she has lost so long ago that they seem foreign to her now
and she doesn’t recognize in the learners in front of her
Will there come a time when they do not recognize themselves?
How is she finding the time and space and locate that person she once was, or maybe always was, in service of the future?
