Happy Easter

I love Easter, love it better than Christmas. I have decades of Easter traditions piled up, and of course, today, none of them will happen.

I love tradition, but on the other hand, tradition can become an enabler, a means of just sleepwalking through life. I love tradition, but I always told my yearbook students that they were not allowed to make any decisions about the book "because that's what we did last year."

So I'm going to try to see today as a reminder to be mindful and deliberate, to strip off the tradition and get back to thinking about why they were a good idea in the first place, what values and ideals and goals they helped express and embody, and get back to those foundational things. It's probably a useful exercise for all of us in this weird pandemic time. It will certainly be a valuable exercise when we are trying to get back to whatever we're going to do.

It's also useful for people of faith, because the last many yeas I've seen my faith hijacked by people who are more focused on venal petty earthly power than on the great I Am, the Creator of all that is or was or will be. I can barely recognize my church any more. So there's that to chew on.

So take the day off. I mean, really off, because even if you haven't had to work, you've still been doing the work of fretting and itching and worrying, so drop that today, too (I know--easy to say). Whatever your faith (or absence thereof), take a day to breathe in and out and in again. Eat something tasty. Call someone. Hug someone. Sit with some quiet and grab hold of your own potent human core, the parts that help anchor you to this world and move through it. I often say that education is about learning to be fully yourself, to understand how the world works and how to be fully human in it. Pretty sure working that out is the gig for our lifetimes.

Love and peace, readers. I'll get back to the rest of it tomorrow.