Once again, I’m spending a dreary, winter Saturday wandering the campus of a Midwestern secondary school.
I can’t help but compare my current life to the one I inhabited just shy of a year ago.
A WHOLE lot has changed!
I’m not even a year older but my kids are burgeoning adults. I am grateful to have the same wildly gifted friends, a few more in fact.
My personality and interests haven’t changed; I still enjoy swimming and boxing, reading, writing and deep conversations.
Personally and professionally life has changed significantly, however. This time last year, I was fighting valiantly to save a dying marriage; working at a job that didn’t fit me well and bored me silly.
Today, when I wandered the halls, paying attention (per usual) to the posters, the art, the signs and quotes, I considered the fact that many of the most significant relationships in my life have changed dramatically.
For example, I’ve lost touch with several branches of my family tree. Some are stronger; I’m stronger!
I am, now, paid a sustainable wage working in a professional roll that suits my personality and honors my educational background; living in a space where my family and I thrive while spending time with people who live, love and laugh whole-heartedly.
Here’s my post from a year ago, enjoy!
Saturday, I spent the entire day in a middle school. I was there to support Science Olympiad. My daughter was a competitor, my husband, a coach.
It has been at least three decades since I’d spent more than an hour or two in a middle school and I relished the experience.
Without much of a role, and nothing but time. I was free to wander the halls, admire the art. I fancied myself an anthropologist, exploring a civilization I was once a part of but left a lifetime ago.
I had four separate phone conversations with four separate friends. Individuals whom I admire immensely.
Reading through this post, I realize that I am somewhat odd in that I had 4 phone conversations in the span of a day. Since my mid-thirties co-worker has told me that she texts her sister, whom she’s close to, before ever calling her, I am likely unique in that I spoke on the phone for over an hour in one day .. . withOUT mentioning that I was having these conversations within the walls of a middle school.
These friends are from disparate parts of my life;
1) my best friend whom I met in college
2) a friend who I met through work when I was in my twenties, she very sweetly introduced me to my husband over twenty years ago and we’ve been tight ever since.
3) A long time friend who’s known my husband and I since before we were married and
4) My dear friend and Spanish tutor who I met years ago at a language school in Guatemala.
As I wandered the halls, catching up with people important to me, I snapped photos.
Being an empath, it is natural for me to see and experience events, scenes, conversations, through the lense of others.
I didn’t discuss the middle school or even the concept of middle school; certainly not my own experience of middle school in these conversations but these conversations shaped my mood and my experience of the day.
Later on, I had the pleasure of driving three 8th graders home from the event. We were over an hour from home but all tired so there wasn’t much in the way of conversation. But being with them, in their orbit, helped me to feel compassion for the 8th grader inside of me.
*carpe diem*
Collecting Pieces of Me 