Today I learned that the Monday before winter exams feels… heavy.
The weight of today was the result of a lot of gathering things: rain in a dark sky; hours to be spent in review; the impending shift from questions to answers; grades to be tallied and recorded; indelible records of achievement soon to be committed to a database and attached to individual names.
Add to that the additional weight of holiday shopping, anticipated travel, nightly cooking and clean up, bath time and laundry, and it’s easy to imagine beating a hasty retreat to the woods in search of Thoreau.
But despite of all that weight, there was lightness. The student who sat in my office this morning and said that he couldn’t conclude his paper because he couldn’t accept what he had realized about the world through the process of writing the paper — this student gave me the gift of levity by taking a kind of flight of the mind before my eyes.
I bounced along the top of the rainclouds for a while after that.
