Coming and Going

A long-ago therapist taught me to see life as a climbing, expanding spiral. “If you look outward, as you come around the bend, it may seem like you are just repeating yourself, stuck in the same old cycle,” she said. “But if you cast your gaze inward and down into the past, you can see how far you’ve come.” It’s an image that’s stayed with me for well over half my life now. “Look inward,” I’ve often said to myself when something feels weirdly familiar. It’s a sound spiritual practice, and one that has spared me some of the worst of my self-judgment. In these latter chapters of my life, especially, I feel a loosening in me -- a posture less defensive, more curious – when I find myself taking a familiar turn.

This is more or less the position I found myself in roughly three years ago. Having left academic life back in 2017, with few backward glances, I found myself returning to college teaching, now on a part-time basis, in 2023. And while I still took too much time in evaluating and coaching student writing – one of the bugaboos that had made me less sorry for the previous exit – I found I was very glad to be in the classroom with first-year university students. It had been a career spanning 20+ years and, in returning to it, I found myself again there. Not the same as I had been, but rooted in familiar goodness—the respectful exchange and testing of ideas, the caring and compassion, the sense of being suited to a role that matters. It was different, of course – as Heraclitus admonished, both the river and I had changed since I’d last entered it. I returned now as a religious professional, and as a student myself in spiritual direction. While the work was, as it ever had been, emphatically secular, I made no attempt to hide my spiritual bent, and it actually helped me to make sense of what I had been doing all along in higher ed, and what it was I was doing now. As I helped young people to listen for the voice of vocation, and to come to language for what they most needed to say – as I had for many years – I felt this work draw on both an older and a newly developing place in me. In many ways (the endless grading notwithstanding), it felt like work I was still-and-again made for.

In John Green’s coming-of-age novel, Turtles All the Way Down, Davis says to Aza about a verse he’s written: “I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that’s what life is like . . .  It rhymes, but not in the way you expect.” Last fall, I earned my credential in spiritual direction and launched my private practice. Then some weeks ago, I found myself rounding a more familiar curve: it became possible for me to return to the congregation I had previously served – a joyful turn of events. So I have in these past weeks been preparing to again close the door on my academic work. When we transition from what we have loved, even when we go elsewhere to heed the call of love, there is grief in it as well as joy. I said my goodbyes a week ago, posted my last round of grades on Tuesday. The new job is similar to this most recent in that neither it nor I are quite the same as we were then – and I will continue in private practice in spiritual direction, companioning folks through all kinds of life transitions as they turn their own gaze inward. Yes, of course, it’s not the same river twice – but weirdly, certainly, it rhymes. And as I contemplate that new beginning, I am glad to have had these past three years again with those I’ve served the longest.

My partner, also an academic, has observed that college students stay the same age, year after year, as we grow older – true enough. But their youth also travels with me – and I am three years better for having known them. May they be blessed at every bend in the road.