Looking back, moving forward

Looking back, I think, is a great way to move forward.

I'm sitting in a classroom, waiting for the kids to come in and scare me. Because I'm the new sub and they don't know what I'm doing here. And that only scares me because I don't exactly know either.

On the back wall there is a green chalkboard, on the side walls are cork-boards, and at the front of the class is a white wipe-off board next to a smart board. I wish I could use the smart board, but because the computer is down it's serving as a backdrop for the overhead projector. Progress. 

When I was a little kid, my mom set up a little school room in the basement of our house and hung a chalk board up on the wall. I remember being in fourth grade and thinking it was the cutest chalkboard ever. It was about five feet square, with a wooden frame painted a nice color - maybe blue, or yellow - and had a small lip at the bottom to hold chalk.

When Mom was hanging the chalkboard, it had chalk drawings on it already. Big round head-bodies that had crude faces and four long appendages stretching straight out where the ears and chin should be. There were also a few flowers and a sun. I thought the technique was ugly and ridiculous.

Then a sudden memory, like a dream, of drawing on a chalkboard in our old house when I was five. The dark hallway, a chalkboard so colossal I don't remember the edges, tiny nubs of chalk lined up on the lip like they were trying to fuse together into one useful piece. Stretching up on my toes to spread my imagination as far as I could into the black empty space.

It took months to reconcile the two chalkboards. I knelt down so that the lip was at eye-level, the way I remembered it, and confessed to myself that it was the same board. That I was once that small, and those were my own drawings.

It was humbling, but encouraging.

I am reminded how important it is that we leave evidence to look back on. To journal, to document, to draw, to photograph, to dialogue. When we feel lost, they are the maps that remind us who we used to be and who we are now.

And also give us clues to who we are becoming.