Soak in the Blue Skies
We're finishing up year 5 of January 2023, a marathon of a month marked by perpetual grayness, coldness, darkness, sadness. It's been a seemingly unending saga of sunlessness and the ramifications are evident. Students are on edge, irritable, quick to anger, sad. Teachers aren't all that different.
The few infrequent bursts of blue sky summon us to stop and soak in its seldom-seen splendor. On one particularly bitter (both air and people) afternoon last week, a cerulean canopy enveloped the world outside my window for a brief but magical moment. Participial phrases had suddenly lost their luster as the class seemed captivated, desperate to savor the sunlight that had for so long gone unseen.
I walked to the window and took in a breath. Thank you God, I whispered. I soon felt the presence of five, ten, then twenty students surrounding me. Silent. Staring. Savoring the blueness. One characteristically football-minded freshman even lifted his hands to the sky and said, "man, that feels good."
It wasn't a mere three minutes before billowing clouds made their way by the window and the world was gray again. "We have to soak those in," I told the students as they headed back to their seats. "We never know how long they'll last."
The next day, a student left this on my desk. It's a watercolor of what we saw that day, a reminder to savor the good things while we've got 'em. I'm going to be on the lookout for more blue skies in the midst of winter -- joyful moments of goodness and light that have us lifting our hands and saying, "man, that feels good."
