Hang on to the beauty of the day! The air is turning colder. The nights creep up quickly! Daylight is too often overcast now! Nothing about any of this sounds appealing! Hold on to the feelings! Hold on to the warmth! And remember, nothing stays as it is for long.
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And so it should be. After all, it is October and it is Wisconsin! When seasons change so dramatically, as they do here in Wisconsin, though, the beauty of each day takes on a different meaning. Right now, I linger on each day of sunshine. It's like I want to harvest the warmth to have it available to me in the upcoming dreary months.
Fall is the smell of burning leaves, the brilliant colors of fall leaves, wooly bears creaping along pathways, geese and ducks flying in formation overhead.
Fall is the end. But fall is also preparation for something. The cycle never ends. It renews!
My thoughts always circle around the world I live in which is education. Each year, as a new school year begins at the end of a summer and the beginning of a fall, the visual scenery seems to shout in celebration! And yet, for all the living things, there is a saddness for the loss! For teachers, the lingering warmth, the long days, all give way to a hectic schedule and deadlines! For those who closed their classroom doors in early June and pursued other things during the summer months, it becomes a new stress over and over again, year after year.
The plants and animal kingdom has the beauty of predictability. It allows animals to prepare for the inevitable. If everything was predictable each fall in schools, the reentry would be less stressful. There is a desire and even heartfelt attempts to keep things predictable. Adults talk of children needing a sense of predictability and boundaries. Children are supposed to develop in a certain order that we can hold as a constant.
And yet, while adults try to hold on to these boundaries and this order, the world changes. The adults in the schools want to believe that September will always stand for specific activities, followed the same way by October, November, and December. And yet, the world does not see months of a year or developmental readiness. The world senses needs! The world reacts rapidly leaving some frozen in anxious contemplation. "What's going on around here?"
Everything spins when it should be slowing down for a long winter's nap! "Everything is out of control!" for some. We can not control the seasons...we can predict them. We can not control needs...we can predict them! We can not control change...it is part of the cycle of life! We can control how we react to it!
