SOONER OR LATER

Sometimes, when a morning mist is spread over Mystic, I think of the many times when a mist seemed to make its way across my teaching – times when all I could see as I was standing before my students was the haze of imprecise lesson plans and sleepy students. Those were the days when doing my job seemed similar to searching for a small stone in a vast forest. On those confused classroom days, try as I might, I saw no signals ahead to help me make the most out of whatever lesson plan I had prepared.  All was confusion and indecision. I guess what I needed to remember was that, like misty mornings hereabouts, things usually sort themselves out and light eventually lets itself through. Almost always the mist around these parts disappears by noon, and a rousing sunshine spreads around us. In its leisurely way, nature alters our world from gray to something closer to gold, and after a mist-filled morning, I’m sometimes walking a sunny beach by three. The lesson in all this? In my just-starting retirement, if a misty kind of confusion drops down upon me, I should simply sit back and be patient and prepare for some eventual and inevitable mental sunshine. It always comes, just like the sun shows itself, sooner or later, in this small seashore town.