The Room

From Friday.

I look around the room. I see my colleagues. Most are friends, some I have know for almost 20 years. They are dear to me, even the ones with whom I have tangled over tough issues. In this tribe we are fierce in our love, passions and respect.

The tribe is evolving. An alchemy is at work. It is not good or bad, like all change it has elements of both. We are dissolving and reconfiguring, changing out the old for the young, the experienced for the novice. I am neither, so I stay. Some are leaving early, as the changing landscape of education is rocky and hard to navigate. It is brutal, like some ancient marathon run at an unimaginably modern speed. People make choices about what they can and can’t tolerate.

This transmutation is woven through with grief for me. I will miss the ones who leave. We have worked, fought and created together. We mounted a kind of battle together in the service of students, so there is an unforgivable emptiness with each one who goes.

Yet even in the loss, I feel a tiny flame of hope that the new will bring ideas we haven’t considered or strategies that will shift the current paradigm out of it’s death throe. We need new thought. We need new attitudes. We need new hope, new expectations, even a new faith. If we can keep that flame alive in this troubled time, perhaps we can survive.