Back to School

I’ve always loved fall: the gorgeous warm light, the riotous colors and excessive plant life, and going back to school. With the slightly cooler temperatures, I feel renewed energy. Once again, I am delusionally optimistic of all that I can accomplish.

I wasn’t always successful in school—nearly retained at the end of third grade—but I started each year hopeful. The unknown possibility of empty notebooks. Perhaps this year I will decode how to be popular? While that never happened, I progressed through the grades, finding safe havens in math classes, school libraries, and yearbook.

Currently, the University of Denver is in our second week of the fall quarter. Another academic year has begun. Again, I am eager, optimistic, and hopeful. One of the things I am eager, optimistic, and hopeful for is this blog. I am excited to continue explaining the LovePOEM. We have covered Pause and Observe. It is time to dive into Empathize and Message. And, of course, there will be diversions—things that must be investigated. I have so many thoughts I wish to articulate and share.

As novelist Sue Grafton wrote,

I’ve never known anyone yet who doesn’t suffer a certain restlessness when autumn rolls around. It’s the season of new school clothes, fresh notebooks, and finely sharpened pencils without any teeth marks in the wood. We’re all eight years old again and anything is possible.

My eight-year-old self wanted to be a child psychologist and a writer. It took me some time to come back to that wisdom, but I have been blessed to be a professor of school psychology for the last 19 years—writing, teaching, learning. What’s the restless possibility that your eight-year-old self had the confidence to believe in? How can you start pursuing that? Is there a baby step that you can take today?

Welcome back to the school of life!