Taking Stock

My brother and his wife were over this past weekend to celebrate Father’s Day with my parents and me.  After dinner, my mom sent all of us down into the basement to go through what seemed like mountains and mountains of STUFF.  (I can hear Mrs. May, my sixth grade religion teacher, in my head right now…  “Stuff is not a word!”)  This was the moment to go through things in the storage room because we will need to have some major repair work done in the basement soon.

It is sobering to go through years’ and years’ worth of STUFF that has accumulated.  It’s like looking back at a past life.  My brother had “projects” from his years at trade school down there that he looked at wistfully but ultimately resigned to the trash or charity piles.  There’s still quite a bit of stuff down there, and it brings back memories of good times and of bad ones too.

I myself have been doing some cleaning out as well, both of my personal belongings at home and of things at work.  Now that I’m two years in at my job, I know what I use, what I need, and what I can safely give away.  Summer is a good time for me to take stock, since in theory, there are fewer things for me to juggle during the summer months.

If you are finding yourself with extra time on your hands, consider taking stock of your own spaces.  Make piles to throw away, piles to donate, and piles to drop off for the Knights of Columbus garage sale in August.  You never know what you might discover.  And if you can’t use something, there is surely someone out there who can.

Preparing for the Unpredictable

At the moment, it feels like we are in something of an indefinite holding pattern.  We don’t know what the next few months, let alone the next few weeks or days, will look like.  I am friends with a lot of teachers at various levels of the education system, and they are feeling the uncertainty particularly strongly as we enter the months of planning and preparation for the new school year.  What will our “public life” look like in the fall?  It is impossible to say.  And yet, teachers have to prepare for all eventualities.  Whether students are back in the classroom or still learning from home, teachers will be there to support them and their parents. 

I myself find myself working through several models of how I might present faith formation for those who would like to become Catholic.  We are very fortunate to have access to online options at the moment, but it can become a poor substitute for in-person interaction.  I find myself falling back on certain strategies I learned in my special education training classes in college.  Differentiated instruction, here we come!  Find multiple ways to convey the same information.  Simplify.  Break down.  Chunk.  All of my education buzzwords.  Don’t assume one way will work for everyone, just because it works the best for you.

Who knows?  Maybe we will stumble onto something that is better than what we had before.  And if not, that’s okay too.  We will adapt, and we will carry on, and we will do the best we can with the circumstances we face.  It doesn’t do us any good to despair over the fact that we don’t know what is coming.  Even when life seems to be predictable, it really isn’t.  Life is going to throw us curveballs, and our reaction to them is what matters in the end.