Bumpy Beginnings

As I face the start of another semester, poised over the computer screen on my desk, stress gathers in a snarl between my shoulder blades sending aches up my neck. Impatience deepens the wrinkle between my eyebrows as I swiftly glance up at the minutes ticking away in the date/time slot at the corner of the screen.

Fifteen years into my professional life, I recognize these physical and emotional responses to the start of a new term, and yet I am helpless to resist. As the to-do list lengthens in my mind, I can only enumerate the tasks at hand: create classes for a new group of strangers who will somehow become beloved students, set a new schedule.

Beginnings are wonderful, but they also invite me to wonder whether I will be able to succeed once again.

When these doubts hit, I find help in remembering that every kind of work has rhythms. Last April when I was scrambling to gather and grade papers, I told my mother—who grew up on a farm and who has no idea how I spend my days—to think of me in the throes of harvest. In August, when I would have preferred to can tomatoes from the garden, I designed new courses and told her that I was planting seeds.

“Think of me as a farmer in the Southern hemisphere, Mom,” I said.

Did she get it? I don’t know.

In any case, this kind of metaphoric thinking helps me to put my personal pressures into perspective. I’d rather be grading essays than bailing hay. As uncertain as institutional life can be under the current economic constraints, it’s nothing like working against the urgency of rain clouds.

Without denying the stressful realities of modern life, I also don’t wish to simply remind myself that things could be worse or admonish myself to count my blessings. (Although I realize that those pat bits of advice have became platitudes because they contain deep wisdom.)

Instead, I only want to remember that my work—as far from the cycles of the earth as it may be—also has rhythms. I take comfort in recalling my grandparent’s labor on the farm, bound to the seasons and larger, cosmic cycles. Their way of life reminds me that nothing lasts forever. As daunting as beginnings may feel, they yield to familiar territory. As hard as we may find endings to be, we do eventually pass through them.

Our times are in your hand, O Lord, I breathe to Him. On my very best days, and in stressful times like this.

Image by Russ. Used with permission via Flickr. Post by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of Eve's Striptease.