Should I Stay or Should I Go... or Leaping vs. Spreadsheets
More information about the artist , Jake Baddeley...and he has a Tarot deck out, too!
Also, thanks (as nearly always) to The Clash for the subheading.
Go find a high school teacher, any teacher. Ask them what time of year brings them the most joy, anxiety, tears, and exultation all rolled into one. Minute by minute. I’ll wait.
**Watches an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the 27th time.**
Oh, good, you’re back. They said “Graduation time, end of the year,” right? I knew it.
May and June are so very emotional, for students and teachers alike. I’m not the warmest person you’ll meet—I’ve been called “prickly” by many, and I accept it–but I’m a gooey mess when my students, some of them three years past original graduation date but now making it, earn their diploma and get their photo on our school’s facebook (and their name up on the annual poster here). Some choose to walk at graduation at the public school, some do not, and that’s okay. It’s still a line, a change, a christening, a knighting, a threshold.
And at these times, I’m bursting with pride over these humans who’ve faced so much, but pressed on. I’m not a parent, but I get to play one on TV at graduation time.
What is it about these transition times that are heavy, so full of heft? So tangible?
I wrote recently about the liminal spaces between life and death, but that’s hardly the only time we place a foot across a threshold and decide whether to follow it up with the rest of ourselves.
I get a daily poem sent in my email from the Poetry Foundation, and today’s really got my attention:
Dear —
By Donika Kelly
I am not land or timber
nor are you
ocean or celestial body,
but rather we are
the small animals
we have always been.
The land and the sea
know each other
at the threshold
where they meet,
as we know something
of one another,
having shown,
at different times,
some bit of flesh,
some feeling.
We call the showing
knowing instead of practice.
We seem to say,
at different times,
A feeling comes.
What is the metaphor
for two animals
sharing the same space?
Marriage?
We share a practice,
you and I,
a series of postures.
Here is how I
become a tree
[ ]
and you
[ ]
a body in space.
“The Land and the Sea know each other at the threshold.” I read that this morning and synapses began firing in parts of my brain, connecting to other parts. I know the poem is more about the two people standing at that threshold more than the threshold itself, but…I’m allowed to let my mind wander and see what it finds.
Is it the seeing of ourselves as a mirror image on the other side–after whatever line of demarcation, experience, degree, marriage, divorce, move, new job, parenthood, whatever has happened–that is the knowing? Do we know we’ll be okay, or do we just hope it to be so?
I had a very nasty, quite long divorce once upon a time. The split was ugly and of an evening’s horror, but the actual process was agonizingly slow as I stood one foot on either side, wishing (as always) for a wind to blow through and push me one direction or another. It was an awful place to be, but a place I find familiar (which doesn’t make it any more palatable), until after a year, I finally filed the damn papers. Thus began another stage of that “becoming” of course; that particular threshold had several parts. But the immense relief of not being in limbo between the winds is something I can still feel.
There are those people who literally leap over such thresholds in life, ready to tuck and roll if need be but willing to embrace whatever’s there. I am not one of those people, but I usually wish I were. I take time to make weighty decisions. I create spreadsheets with weighted categories, research, set it aside to let it seep in, discuss it endlessly. And I doubt I have any better results than those who’ll somersault backward into the ether on the other side.
I lived with my first husband for six years before getting married. After the aforementioned divorce, I lived with my second husband for nine years before doing that whole marriage thing again (we’re about to celebrate our 19th anniversary, so nearly 28 years together).
I spent many awful, angsty years with untreated depression and anxiety (teens, twenties) with one foot on either side of the suicide demarcation, desperately wanting something so awesome, or so awful, to happen to make that decision for me. Unfortunately, the awful one showed up first, but equally fortuitous, I was as lousy at the actual dying part of the the act as I was at making up my mind. I’ve certainly been grateful these last several decades that I was as inept as I was (or my body was determined to overcome anything I did to relieve it of its duty, more like).
I’ve been on a wee little journey of trying to achieve more physical health and mental health since last summer (2025), when my BFF since 1979 saw right through my bullshit and knew I needed a kick in the pants. That’s what best friends do. She’s expert at it, and that’s a compliment. Since that time, she’s been leading me skillfully into recognizing why my brain does what it does that leads to self-sabotage and NOT GETTING ANYTHING DONE. It’s baby steps, but I’m in a far, far better place than I was when I started, so it’s working. I really want off this threshold, but I’m also realizing that in some very real ways, some thresholds don’t exactly end; they become new floors. I’m not a patient person, but I’m learning how to be. Sorta. (Note: My BFF takes on other clients, if you're interested! Put it in comments or email me!)
Watching my students enter American adulthood with all their questions, and hopes, and great fears, and trepidation and relief showing on each of their faces, I remember exactly what that felt like. Many of my students are in far better places to make these decisions; some are not. As it’s always been, of course.
We–each of us, humans–need to be willing to know that hazy, wavering self that lies on the other side, to put a hand out and grasp, in order to do anything. Very few thresholds lead to permanent, inescapable disaster. That’s good. I imagine very few lead to unqualified successes as perfection doesn’t exist, but hope springs eternal. Perhaps some folks could use my spreadsheet-method-of-preparation a little more; I know that I need to spend less time sitting directly ON the threshold hoping fate will decide for me. Not my forte.
Perhaps it may someday be a strength. Somewhere…on the other side.
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