Stop hitting yourself

It is 6:11 AM. I need to be in my classroom giving a final exam in just under two hours.

I don’t really have to give a final. I really only offer it so I can cancel it.

In my classes, students who attend 100% of classes get to skip it. As a reward for showing up, they get to not show up. I usually get about half of them to consistently show up (and the other half to finally show up).

Me, I’m always there. But not after today.

Today is my last day of teaching. Last. Day. Ever.

While I am resolved to the decision, I am also sad to be losing the feeling of freedom, escape, liberation that comes with finishing each semester.

Have you heard the one about a man who keeps hitting himself in the head with a board because he likes the way it feels when he stops? Since I am a child of the 80s, I told this joke with a protagonist who was an extraordinarily unwise man of a particular Eastern European ethnic group, so I’ll update the bias for contemporary audiences:

College prof 1: Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a board?

College prof 2: Because I like how it feels when I stop.

It’s a kid's joke that kind of gets lost in the retelling, but you see the grown-up lesson.

Part of me wants to keep going back to that classroom so that I can savor the feeling of not going back to that classroom.

I worry that the extraordinary excitement I feel in punctuating my year with a full stop each December and May will dissipate into just another long march of days and weeks and months of the same.

How do I keep my life’s emphatic fragment sentences from being replaced with a tedious run-on?

I’ve only ever had one job outside of academia, and that was in the space between undergrad and grad. But even that job I knew would come to an end when I took it—that’s why I took it! I’ve never had a job that wasn’t measured in a sequence of endings, in lots of little deaths.

Perhaps my lesson here is learning to enjoy present moments rather than always looking forward to their end.

As I embark on my adventures as—what?—a creativity coach? chief poetry officer? language doula?—my work that has always been and will never end—I will learn to savor the liberation of continuation without continually wanting to hit myself in the head with it.