Retrospect: when you don’t go back, part0

Self-tutoring about life transitions: the tutor reflects.

With school recently ending for another year, many people won’t return to that one. They might’ve graduated from high school, for instance, so will proceed to college. Perhaps they just finished grade 5, so will go on to middle school.

Such transitions in life can seem sudden, especially when you think back on them. The change from elementary to middle school can be especially jarring: a person might spend six years at the same elementary school, which by the time they finish grade 5, has been more than half their life. Summer comes, like usual, but then they start at the middle school, completely new to them.

Such transitions are natural and normal, of course, but they can leave echoes. On your way home one evening, you might pass your old school, and it appears just as if you never left. The old basketball court, empty, seems to invite you and your friends to return for a game. Yet, your basketball friends can’t be brought together, even though it happened spontaneously short years ago.

Life – especially our lifestyle today – typically accumulates so many of those places one used to be part of, but whose time there has ended – forever, it seems. They are still in the landscape, but perhaps you’re not meant to notice them anymore: you’re supposed to focus forward.

I’ve often paid attention to other people’s reactions to such transitions. I recall my first girlfriend, decades ago, telling me, “I really enjoyed middle school, but don’t tell anybody, because nobody else liked it there. They won’t understand how I did.”

Some people simply never look back – the day one part of their life ends, they never think of it again. I’ve a son like that. Whether it’s best to be that way, I don’t know, but I often wonder.