Tag: work Page 2 of 4

And We Must Go

On beginnings and endings, change, and staying un-stuck.


Something there is about the ends of things, the delicate parts where the golden light shines on everything about you before it fades to dusk. Something there is when you know that ahead, just across the horizon, lies the big, the unknown.

For the past nine years, our growing family has made its home in a quiet neighborhood dotted with brick ranches and mature trees. For nine years before that, we lived a few hundred yards away in the next neighborhood over in a cozy split-level on a cul-de-sac.

Kelly is a native of this town, born in the old downtown Davis hospital the college razed a few years ago. She grew up in another brick ranch and tall treed neighborhood not much more than a mile from where our house stands now. She attended school in the same building where she now works, the same place our children learn. Save for the four years she spent away at college, she’s never lived anywhere but within a handful of several square miles in Statesville.

Those college years were formative in many ways.

Tossing Out Mr. Hogan

Yours truly with a group of former students in 2007.

Cleaning is cathartic, but how do you throw out a profession?


For eight years, I’ve kept a half dozen copy paper boxes shut in a closet in our basement. These boxes were full of file folders that were, in turn, filled end to end with paper, thousands and thousands of pages that were the sum total of my brief career as a high school English teacher.

Pop psychologists sometimes talk about the baggage we carry around with us as we go from place to place and point to point in our lives. It makes for a nice metaphor: this notion that we are often weighed down by reminders of our previous experiences, and that cumulatively, these experiences can inhibit our way to make any kind of progress.

The good news is that the yards of copy paper in my basement never impeded my ability to leave teaching and find other work–that turned out just fine. And yet, I’ve lived with them in a sort of hidden proximity ever since I left my classroom in 2007. I cannot remember why I felt compelled to save them.

The Joy Amidst the Sorrow

What if it took a global pandemic to find work-life balance? And what does that mean when it’s over?


These days I wake up without an alarm, usually sometime around 7 a.m., often to the quiet chatter of our kids playing somewhere in the house. I lie in bed for a few minutes collecting my senses, looking outside at the emerging dawn, the tender, pregnant buds on every tree, the muted birdsong, quiet streets.

Within a few minutes, I remember: there’s a pandemic.

It’s a bit like grieving a death, really. You wake up, and for a few precious moments your brain pulses about, hopscotching from one synapse to the next until suddenly it lands upon the bruised one, the lightning-trigger that drops your stomach. Each morning is a little easier than the previous one. That’s what endurance does for you. How quick the new normal.

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