Quiet Endings

Tomorrow, it will be December. Today, an important part of my life ends; I say goodbye quietly to November. 

Dylan Thomas wrote, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The opposite is what I feel. I feel the grace of quiet endings.  

I had written about how I left the workplace (What, Me Retire?) where my advertising career lasted for over 20 years. I left without a huff for a complex reason. And today, I am leaving my teaching career of about the same number of years—gently into the night, again without a huff—for another complex reason. 

As I jokingly tell family and close friends, I have reached my point of irrelevance. Students have morphed into aliens I cannot recognize. Try as I might, I could no longer engage them, not with the tools of life I have learned through hard knocks.  

And then there’s AI. I teach critical writing, but in checking papers, I could not distinguish which part is  from some bot out there and which part is the student’s.    

Teaching has been just a few hours of my time during the week because I spend most of my days  writing books on grace. But I enjoyed interacting with young people and passing on everything  I know about the subject; I looked forward to either a Tuesday or whatever day I was assigned a class or two. 

Alas, the interaction is gone. Last  semester, I performed all magic tricks—soliloquy, song-and-dance, standing on my head, fire eating, etc.—before a stoic audience totally tuned off. And the saddest part is, some brazenly challenged comments on their work or questioned their grades. 

The last nail in the coffin was a gentle nudge from management for teachers to be careful in cracking jokes as some may get offended--through a memo. 

So a week ago, I chose not to go to the graduation rites, which I never failed to attend year after year. My presence would not have altered anything, neither would my absence. A silent exit it was.  

Coincidentally, the repairs and renovation of our 48-year-old house, which had begun in June, is finally finished.  By tomorrow, I should be relishing quiet peace. 

"There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven . . . A time to be silent and a time to speak; A time to love and a time to hate; A time for war and a time for peace."  Ecclesiastes 3:1, 7-8 (NLT)