What Does It All Mean Anyway?
A place-based existential crisis (sort of)
I need a holiday and I am formulating a plan to make one happen. (Any recommendations?)
In the meantime, I’m doing day trips a little closer to home. On Reframeables I’ve referred to such travels as “place-based” remembering. Essentially that means walking into a haunt that calls up stories from the past simply by being in the space. (Of course that means dealing with those stories in the present — but we’ll get to that).
Thanks to the power of digital libraries, this week I didn’t even have to leave the house to set off on my place-based journeys. I’m currently finishing a research project (that I wrote about here) and the process has obligated that I take a meandering trip down memory lane — to 2011 to be exact. It was a year where I was in grad school and teaching full time. It was also a year of great transition for I was leaving one school behind for a leadership position in another. In the midst of all that change I was taking a course called “Education in Urban Contexts” which inspired a paper I co-wrote with two student colleagues and our professor. I spent today rereading our paper “What Is Really New in the ‘New’ Urban Environment?” And rereading meant [re]membering a past version of myself when I wrote:
In our moves between old and new spaces, we hold both insider and outsider status, forever crossing borders that we never conceptualized as existing in the first place…We come to understand that all geographical spaces, no matter how intimately we come to experience and understand them, are always fraught—with nostalgic ambiguity for the old space we once called home and apprehensive excitement as we move forward and away into a new community. We grapple with feelings for what was (that may never have been ours) mixed with hope for what is to come. Though the different spaces, old and new, will never converge, we learn limits in the process of remembering. The boundaries have shifted, necessitating change in our ways of seeing; and moreover, the boundaries have impacted and informed how and what we remember.
Canadian and International Education 40(3) - December, 2011
Reading that decade old essay on my couch today, I pictured waking from the university dorms where we stayed for the conference to the smallish classroom where we shared our work with peers. It was my first academic paper. I was so excited! I didn’t know then what I know now about writing. About struggle.
It was a different, more hopeful time.
Perhaps today’s return to a place and time (almost forgotten) is exactly the kind of holiday I needed. A day trip for the mind. A sort of relational reading experience — with myself!
As boundaries shift that necessitate changes in what and how we see the world, can we remain engaged insiders? Not just in the essays of our pasts but in the writing of new words in the present? What borders need crossing to truly become in places that fill us with hope?
P.S. A new episode of the Reframeables podcast is out today! Listen to
and me chat with author Sara Petersen about momfluencer culture (and literary criticism!). She writes and has a new book out this month.P.P.S. Speaking of new books…
“Perhaps today’s return to a place and time (almost forgotten) is exactly the kind of holiday I needed.”
My friend, the answer is no. No, it is not. This is no holiday.
Though the different spaces, old and new, will never converge. This true indeed, with a smile I flash on Father the master of time covering our past and future. A cloud behind and fire before us. It's good to remember even God remember and answer us. Yep a trip, a pause or reflection....when we say ahhh thank You Father.