Anatomy of a Composition - A Circular Motion

The changes that can take place in a year, much less a few months can be both overwhelming and humbling. Yet time and order and the constancy of habit will make the days and years disappear. For 30 years my “new year” was marked by the beginning of August while the months of December, January and February were the long, cold slog in the middle. 

Days feel different now without the manic pace of classroom work, planning and grading and the commitments to co-workers and building systems and structures. Recently the days revolve around feeding and walking a dog, along with grocery shopping and food prep and cooking for myself and my son Andrew. The amount of information that has passed out of my day-to-day use so abruptly is startling to say the least.  From attendance taking and meeting organization, to behavior referrals and parent phone calls, the final few hundred days of my working career were a flurry of memos and meetings along with conversation with students and teachers, co-workers but mostly myself. 

30 years as a classroom teacher, along with outdoor and adventure education and teaching have shaped my worldview and certainly shaped the patterns of my day. Prompt, timely, regimented, structured - anyone of these adjectives could be used to describe the approach to each day. For better or worse the intent required to get through each day offered little room for misstep or error. Emergencies that might come up in the course of the day had potential to derail and frustrate the momentum - and arguably what really should be just small upsets often felt catastrophic, certainly a flaw in my own personality.

Now, four months removed from the frenetic pace and two months into assembling a new set of routines, much of the minutiae of the former routines seems to have settled away. Packing up the office, a classroom and a living space, each representative of different periods and punctuating stages of grief and growth has revealed a new set of opportunities.  There will still be tasks to accomplish - decisions to be made about property and place as well as destinations. A “New Year” this year has a new meaning, one I haven’t fully formed an acceptance of but one that will be a new guide, a new demarcation, a new circular motion.

Colorado Autumn Sunset - Sony a7iv & FE 14 GM - ISO 160 | F/7.1 | 1/100 sec ~ 14mm - single image