Without a Country

A few weeks ago, I attended the dance concert at Oaks Christian—where I work—on the same night, it turned out, as a group of young female teachers who happen to be friends of mine as well as colleagues. There had been a cursory discussion between myself and a couple of the teachers about going to dinner beforehand. So, the afternoon before the performance, I sent an email to one of them to see if any dinner plans had crystallized, but received no reply. I then approached the other to see if she had made any plans. Seeming to have forgotten any mention of dinner in our discussion from a few days before, she said she had already agreed to go to dinner with one of the English teachers along with the other young women in the group. And I got the distinct feeling that I was not welcome, and more specifically, that it was a girls-only affair. I also started to realize, from having seen them congregate in various contexts and places around campus, that this group of about five young teachers had become a kind of clique. In truth, it makes a lot of sense. These young women are all friends, and it’s entirely natural for them to bond and to wish to spend time together apart from friends and colleagues outside their situation,
gender, and age range. The connection is totally understandable, and I certainly don’t mean my recognition to sound like criticism. Nor is this a pity party for Moya. What I noticed simply brought into bold relief what is now so hard to ignore and just as hard to bemoan. My exclusion from the dinner plans that night was nothing more than a tiny waving flag helping me to see something I believe has been perfectly evident in my life at Oaks for the past year or so, and that's this: things just aren't like they used to be.

Once upon a time, maybe six or seven years ago, I was among a group of young teachers at the school who spent a great deal of time together both in and outside of work. It used to be that weekends, afternoons and evenings before long breaks, or evening performances like the one I’ve mentioned here were a time to decompress with the other twenty-something teachers at the school. Excursions to coffee shops, happy hour and meals at local restaurants, and browsing the intellectually edifying aisles at Barnes and Noble were a way of life for us. But things are different now. For me at least. As British novelist L.P. Hartley once said, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Whatever paradigm of camaraderie may have governed the relationships of which I partook just a half-dozen years ago, a little time has passed, and things are different here. Even if I had not been sensible as to the boundaries now petitioned in my mind with respect to my age and situation, the past has its own customs and concerns, its own network of relationships and cultural awareness that breeds a hierarchy of importance. And these are wholly distinct from those we have here and now. A different time is a different place. This is as true for a person as it is for people. And the night of the dance concert, aside from the fact that I quite simply have no business imposing my company on a group of young female teachers seeking to bond, I was acutely aware of having reached the expiration of my membership in the young teacher clique. I’m no longer welcome in that space of vibrancy, the exhilaration of a new career, a new life, and the fresh appeal of being suddenly adult, suddenly responsible, yet retaining that playful and somewhat sophomoric spark of juvenility, the electricity of being formerly though still recently an adolescent. I’m not welcome there. Truth be told, nor should I be. For me, the stir of these neighboring seasons of life has passed.

Now, for sure, one can always remain a youthful spirit, and I believe and hope I will always be young at heart—very much a boy waving a wooden sword in celebration of the ridiculous, eager to laugh heartily at complete and utter nonsense. Such will always be a facet of who I am, “cultured but accessibly goofy,” to quote my friend Gina. And yet, still unmarried and thus without children, I’ve not yet entered that intermediate province of life wherein family and the stock of being professionally seasoned are the primary personal currency. I am, as my colleague Nancy Thompson put it a few days later, a “man without a country,” though, I believe, quite different from the protagonists envisioned by Edward Everett Hale or Kurt Vonnegut in their works of the same name. I have entered a time of life in which I must cease to be young, though without the traits and circumstances—the “status,” if you will—that allows me to find, in my peers, a sense of equivalent demand, a fellowship of purpose. (This, by the way, is exactly why those who are married with children, as kindly as they may intend to include their single friends in their lives, seem to get along so much better with others who are, like themselves, married with children.) It was the disconnect that startled me, not any small though salient exclusion, as the opportunity for any potential hurt was so quickly transformed to understanding. And this epiphanic moment was not necessarily something to lament, I realized. I didn’t find myself wallowing pathetically in self-pity. Instead, I understood that what has happened is natural and reasonable, thoroughly apropos of who I am and where I am. What’s more, these in-between days will themselves come to an end at some point, perhaps sooner than I expect. And in the bittersweet interim, my hope is to forbear, graciously and with a serene attention to the tasks at hand, until the day I may face new glories and challenges: the delights and travails of marriage and parenthood, a more skilled and thus revered status as a professional, or perhaps some welcome combination of these. For all I know, such things are imminent. It could be that tremendous change is just ahead. As much as we like to plan, as much as we hope and expect things to happen, life manages to catch us unprepared. But the order of the day is always contentment, a diligent devotion to what sits before you.

So until I enter this new and future country, dwelling indeterminably in the strange land to which I’ve now come, my tasks are evident and my purpose clear: to lend a patient ear and a caring hand to family and friends; to do right by my students in striving to be a better teacher; to explore God’s word and allow the wisdom and mysteries therein, wherever they may emerge, to root themselves in my heart; to serve others to whatever extent I’m called; to improve myself by partaking of the intellectual and spiritual pursuits that foster growth; to rejoice in the music that fills the landscape of my interior; to straighten my tie and act like a gentleman; sip my coffee and relish the simple things; to bear each day with serenity; to weep when it all feels like too much; but otherwise to smile, to laugh, to breathe. This is life, not what we idealize, but what we embrace. Though it’s very crucial we continue to dream, so as to shepherd hope, I’d like to think it takes courage—a courage I may yet possess—to embrace what’s given as opposed to what’s imagined or sought. Life is heroism. The individual saga, it is to each of us the singular and continual accretion of understanding and perspective and how we each acquit ourselves in the face of a unique amalgam of complex, adverse, and occasionally tragic episodes that lead us inexorably to some future destined self. I may yet be more. I may yet enter some new province, though it will likely bear little resemblance to what I’ve imagined. But for here and now, I’m here. And now.