#indoorrecess

This morning I got up at 0530 to fight a house fire in -21°. We worked outside with water raining down on us for hours. When I got home I found out Jiu Jitsu classes today were cancelled. I took this as a sign to sit back and enjoy these gifts from our friends @jimbeamofficial #scotch #whisky #whiskey #snowday #freezing #indoorrecess https://www.instagram.com/p/BtRwn91BXHx/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=vt3zf0yg1v9c

Being sick on your #springbreak is worse than #indoorrecess #teacherslife https://www.instagram.com/p/BvhK_ucp3eI/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1qdnykgmbuowt

It’s Fri-Day🍟 Come by and break out the board games on this rainy 🌧 day @joystickgamebar. #indoorfun #indoorrecess #tacos #cocktails #games #arcades #boardgames #uno 📸@atlantafoodguy https://www.instagram.com/p/Br72sDUlsgZ/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=6a7thhxmbim2

It’s Fri-Day🍟 Come by and break out the board games on this rainy 🌧 day @joystickgamebar. #indoorfun #indoorrecess #tacos #cocktails #games #arcades #boardgames #uno https://www.instagram.com/p/Br72mpUF9q_/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=njabz5bjrrjn

It’s Fri-Day🍟 Come by and break out the board games on this rainy 🌧 day @joystickgamebar. #indoorfun #indoorrecess #tacos #cocktails #games #arcades #boardgames #uno https://www.instagram.com/p/Br72jHRljez/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=n43k2u3q158u

Indoor recess today and my kids made me 2 small cakes and my name! lol #teacher4life #thelittlethings #mystudentsaremybabies #mykids #indoorrecess

September is the beginning of everything, as far as I’m concerned, because for what is still the majority of my life, that was when the school year started.  And school was pretty much where life happened.  It is where I made friends.  It is where much of my major, measurable personal development occurred, where I learned foundational things about the world, its history, and my place in it.  It was the setting within which my accomplishments meant something. And it was the center around which my extracurricular activities revolved.  To my younger self, it was the Real World, even if I understood that it was a pond which would eventually deposit me into the ocean. Around the first week of September every year, my body gears up for a beginning.  When the weather gets just a shade colder, and it starts to get darker a bit earlier, I feel immense anticipation.  This year, especially. But the milestones from my youth are no longer relevant.  I don’t have a promise of seeing old classmates, or meeting new ones.  I won’t develop new relationships with teachers or mentors.  Nobody will curate information for me to consume.  There will not be a semester, nor will there be the accompanying guaranteed measurable accomplishment that I can feel proud of by the time Winter Break comes around.  There isn’t even such thing as “Winter Break” anymore.   Most disorientingly, I’m no longer building towards a discrete point at which I will have “graduated” from my current world to another one that is somehow more real and meaningful.  I’ve arrived in that world.  And it feels less real than the old one. I try to comfort myself by pointing out that now, for the first time, I am free to determine my own milestones.  And last September, the way I did that was by signing up for a post-graduate certificate in Scientific Illustration.  Which is to say, I just went back to school.  And it helped, somewhat.  I felt accomplished this year, at the end of Spring, when I had a little mini-graduation, and got my little certificate, and looked back on a year which was a certified job-well-done, and which an academic authority considered to be time well-spent.  But I can’t do that again this year.  I don’t want to.  Because if I don’t break out of the need for those imposed milestones now, I can’t think of a reason why I ever would.  The challenge of defining one’s milestones isn’t just one of devising a calendar to follow.  When you are out of school, and are defining your own milestones, what you are doing is deciding what your life is going to be about.  You have a finite amount of time to decide this.  Essentially, the transition from relying upon school’s imposed meanings to relying on your own comprises an existential crisis.  And most people my age are having it, while simultaneously struggling with a shit economy, a planet which is teetering on the edge of doom, and a relative absence of prescribed values, tradition and direction which guided their parents’ transition into adulthood.  Rather than discovering in our mid-lives, amidst the consequences of the thoughtless decisions of our younger selves, that our lives are ours to decide, some of us are realizing it now. Which is good, because it buys us that much more time to be intentional about our lives.  But also: we’re having our mid-life crisis, and we can’t afford the sports car to make us feel like we have some measure of control. The challenge of whittling down the options of how to exist meaningfully is overwhelming to me.  Nobody is holding me accountable for progress in any direction, except me.  There will be no test to determine if I have learned the important lessons of life, except the tests of my own making, by my own criteria, which are subject to change.  The separation of the Ends (graduating to the Real World) from the Means (doing a bunch of stuff) is absurd. Doing things for the sake of doing them is really the only thing that makes sense, now. I have to remind myself of this on a daily basis.  I am not obliged to build anything that I don’t want to build, whether it would take me a day or ten years.     I have incredibly warm memories of being in school. People who went to elementary school in the PNW are probably familiar with the concept of “indoor recess”.  It was my favorite kind of recess, because it meant we got to stay inside and take advantage of various art supplies, if only for 20 minutes.  There are many book reports that I vividly remember writing.  Many PE classes I suffered through.  Countless social humiliations.  But everything is colored rosily by the fact that it occurred during a period of fumbling, mistake-ridden attempts at new things in an environment which encouraged and forgave such foibles in service of personal growth.   That, I think, is the basis upon which post-school meaning must be founded. Ultimately, even if the academic world imposed temporal and achievement-oriented milestones on me, it was still a safe space that would insulate me from the real-world consequences of being a novice in everything.  And I mistakenly assumed this meant that, once in the real world, because no one would temper consequences with a second-chance mentality, the safe space must necessarily evaporate.  But actually, it just means that I have to learn how to create a safe space for myself, in which I can try things, make mistakes, endure their consequences, and forgive myself as a learning, growing person. You can pick the “wrong” way to be, and realize it, and try a different way.   That is what it would look like to dissolve the gap between the ends and the means.  There might be consequences that appear to trap you.  You might hurt someone.  No, you definitely will.  You might even end up homeless, or imprisoned, or maimed.  I am not saying that you can wheedle your way out of the shenanigans you cause by choosing your identity.   You can’t even wheedle your way out of the shenanigans other people cause.  You do not get to choose the consequences.  And you especially don’t get to choose how you feel about the consequences.  That is not how emotions work, and fuck all of the people who say that. Jesus. But you do get to choose your own conditions for failure.  And also, therefore, of success.   Or maybe, don’t even take life as a Pass/Fail course.