Yesterday was the first day of Preschool Drive-By Parades to celebrate the end of the school year. It was cold and it was rainy, and it was the first thing on my schedule for the day, so I brought my coffee mug outside with me. The parade itself was great, and it was wonderful to see all our preschool students who we’ve been missing since March. But in my haste to “catch” an air hug from one of the kids, I dropped my coffee mug. It cracked into three big pieces, and even though I eventually picked it up and tried to fit the shards back like a 3D puzzle, my first thought was “that’s not going back like it was.”
The preschool teachers (and probably many of you) have all seen me walking around the building in the mornings with my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee mug. I’ve used it pretty much every morning Sunday-Thursday for years. And I’ll miss it. But it turns out it was pretty easy to shrug off that tiny change. We’ve all had to be adaptable lately, and I think we’ll all have to continue being adaptable for a long time. Even as our state slowly reopens, we’ll be looking around at a lot of things and thinking “that’s not going back like it was.” When Paul says “the old has passed away,” he does so with excitement. And when the changes around us are bigger than our coffee mugs, I hope we remain adaptable and choose to celebrate what is rather than mourn what was.
