The implied promise of back to school

In my part of the world school has been in for a week now, fall is in the air, and I am relishing in the paradox of the season. As days get shorter and air becomes cooler, as summer harvests make way for fall compost, there is this intuition that things are coming alive again. This is the first year, since I left school, that back-to-school has perfectly coincided with starting a new job. As one who claims to be attuned to spiritual things, I am caught off guard by just how fired up with Spirit I feel in this new season. I find myself in moments of beginning countless times a day; it feels like anything is possible! A new job in September is like snow in July or a surprise package arriving in the mail: the anticipation is almost more than one can handle.

I’ve always loved the back-to-school season. The rituals of shopping for new shoes, bright sharpened pencil crayons in a crisp box, and if you’re really lucky, the latest superhero lunch box. Then there’s the feelings, the excitement and worry all tangled together.

Will my friend be in my class? Will I get the teacher I hope for? Come to think of it, none of the back-to-school adrenaline has anything to do with the subjects to be learned. Mostly it’s about the worry and promise of relationships new and old.

Beginnings hold this tangle of expectation and anxiety. Every hope of a new start has a shadow side. I’m so excited to make new friends. What if no one talks to me? I can’t wait to meet my new teacher. What if I have a terrible teacher? I can’t wait to shake things up in this new job. What if I can’t deliver on what I’ve promised? The greater our hopes, the deeper our fears.

You don’t need to be starting a new school year or job to feel the anticipation of a beginning. You don’t need a significant event to employ the practices of starting fresh. Whether it’s a new school year, new job, or a new day – I imagine beginnings to be a wee pause between what was and what is yet to be. They are like the moment between an inhale and exhale, between a swing reaching the top and coming back down. When you begin, for the smallest of moments, anything is possible.

Trouble is, they don’t last long. Irony is: if beginnings lasted, they’d lose their power.

In open and relational theology, we speak of this as present moment novelty. It speaks to how this moment arises out of what has come before and is woven into what comes next. But this moment is active and alive, and open in a way that no other moment can be. This moment is novel, it is a breath of possibility.

What if we thought of each moment as holding the promise of something new? What if we practised attuning to that sense of anticipation moment by moment? I’ve been trying to shake this idea that the world can be reduced to binaries, for a very long time. If each beginning was not a determinative moment of whether the future would be good or bad but instead an opportunity to be fully present in the here and now, might our actions be better grounded? I wonder if attention to this moment might lead to better choices and result in planting more life and beauty.

Novelist and theologian Frederick Buechner says that every beginning holds an implied promise, that something is about to happen. That, I think, is why beginnings are bursting with anticipation and anxiety. You don’t know when something starts, if it will last, if it will bear fruit. Will the butterflies in my stomach morph into a deep and lasting affection for this person? Will I be successful, in friendship or vocation? But you do know that there is an implied promise, that something is about to happen. Life is a big messy mix of good and bad, of realized dreams and dashed hopes. I’m not sure that measuring our lives by how much good or bad we’ve accumulated is all that faithful to life. Instead, we might be wise to plant ourselves in the right now, to look for the implied promise in this moment, not just when things are fresh and new but when things are not going as we might have hoped.

When you begin, for the smallest of moments, anything is possible.

I think I’ll come back to this one when fall shifts to winter and beginnings are more difficult to see through the grey. That will be the moment to test my theory! When those times come, I’ll take inspiration from the past and remember that, according to Genesis, when God first created, she did it from chaos. Beginnings are messy after all, a tangled mess of worry and excitement, and the implied promise that something important lies ahead.