It has been a long time coming.

Now that summer of 2021 is finally here, I’ve taken my first step off the New Trier treadmill to assess who I am, and what I’ve learned from the pandemic.

Some lessons are more prominent, visceral even. For example, kids and teenagers alike need kindness. Compassion for uncertainty seems particularly important, and less common. The emotions we feel—I and my students—are at the forefront of what we say and do. I have an emotional hair-trigger, quick to anger, quick to laugh, quick to express joy and frustration. I am increasingly less patient, so I am working more diligently, slower but with more purpose.

One lesson from J. Campbell: the importance of rites and rituals in our lives. New beginnings. Closing doors. As I’m getting older I more deeply appreciate divisions, how we separate experience into patterns. Now I am done with grade school. Now I am done with middle school. Now I am done with high school, and on and on and on. The constant is who we are, and what we believe. Our memory and emotional experience, our personality is what carries through each door. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, I see with more clarity every stage of my life, each part of me, the larger aspect.

I am so glad to have endured and survived this pandemic with my family, friends, colleagues, students. Like Richard Brautigan in “Please Plant This Book,” “[m]y friends worry and they tell me / about it. They talk of the world / ending, of darkness and disaster. / I always listen gently, and then / say: No; it’s not going to end. This / is only the beginning, as this book / is only a beginning.”

Teaching is like that. There is no ending. Only the cliché of beginning again.