Moving

As a teacher of English, I spend a great deal of my time thinking about words and meaning. Words, though inert, can move the heart and prompt the mind to create and to destroy. I think about the power of my words. I think about the power of the words I choose and the ones that I centre in my classroom and in my life.

She is moving homes. She is packing up a life after a split and having to go back to her parents’ home, only temporarily, but it is a pause, a stepping back to regroup before moving on. There are two stories of two different women here and both of them are moving, literally and figuratively. I think about their need to just move without words in order to get to another part of life less painful. They have moving stories.

And now, I am thinking about the ways in which we move and the ways in which others move us. Do our physical movements in space map out the emotional and spiritual movements of our lives? Do my physical steps symbolically represent the emotional or psychological steps I hope I am making? These questions vibrate inside me like a persistent hum of a power station and I decide to move to think.

This morning, I remembered a day long ago when a former student told me that my ability to care for my students was my greatest strength and how nearly simultaneously I said, “And my greatest weakness.” Moving is hard. Being moved is hard, but worth it.