So, we've "made it" through. The last week of classes. The precipice of Thanksgiving break. The beginning of the end. Rejoice.
I find myself feeling just astoundingly tired; like, cosmically exhausted. Out of breath, attention shot, emotionally spent. Done. But somehow, I'm still standing balanced (however barely) on this tightrope of a semester, hanging high in the air above a fog of a future. Every now and again the fog swirls and I see a clear patch of ground not too far down; hope glances back up at me. But for the most part, it's been a very dense fog, on a very high tightrope, between two very far apart cliffs.
Students will be leaving campus in the next week's time. The low hum-rhythm of what we've fashioned together these past several months as a semblance (or more positively, a reinvention) of campus life will again wane to the kind of quietness about campus that only means students aren't around; one that strangely seems now so familiar to our "new normal." An empty quiet, a kind of quiet with finality.
But the gag is, of course it won't be so final. None of this has been, and none of it will be. Though pushed back, next semester is sure to rear its head quicker than we think, just as it always has. Classes will start, weather will warm, and the whole bit is likely to blitz through our lives (in the sense of both very quickly as well as chaotically), just as it always has. And it'll be very challenging, but stimulating, and invigorating too, just as it always has been. There is a lot up in the air, a lot of uncertainty. Sure. But there's some certainty despite all that, too: that we'll still get through it, together. Just as we know how.
A wiser, more well-read person would be able to connect these points to a clever adage, or a bit of scripture, or a helpful analogy, a parable. I'm not so wise and certainly not so well-read. My best attempt is the tightrope image. But as twisted in knots as my stomach feels being up here, as unsure as I feel about life right now, I can "ground" myself a bit being sure about one thing: that everyone else is as unsure as I am.