I’ve always wondered how “commencement” got to mean “leaving familiar ground” (commencement as graduation) and “starting new things” (commencing the journey).
Today is definitely one of those dual-definition days. This morning, on the SLM blog, I posted my last post. After five years and over 1000 posts, it’s hard to walk away from. While this was my choice and the result of the “happy” accident of an overabundance of opportunities and possibilities, today’s post was a kind of crossing the stage and flipping the tassel. It’s been a very familiar place for me to occupy and customize over the past several years, and having this blog become my new home is full of uncertainty. On that blog, the audience was a rather known quantity (and, to my great fortune, a lovely quantity!). So it’s a day of mixed emotions — nostalgia tinged with melancholy among them, as many graduation days are. I am very grateful for all that blossomed in my life as a result of the gift of that space.
Simultaneously, today is the part of our incoming master’s students’ orientation, when we finally meet them and get to share a few things that excite and energize us about why we love libraries and learning and the still-emerging intersections between those familiar concepts and new directions — and we start to hear the same from them. And so it is a day of high excitement, good energy, and time to hang out a bit with faculty members before we all get so busy that we just wave as we pass in the hall. On top of that, our team had an amazing conference call about a possibility to try out some new ideas in October (more on that as it develops), and it was so much fun to hear people’s excitement, pass notes, and imagine possibilities. A real kind of synchronicity. Different commencements.
This has been a summer that was “supposed” to be dotted with down time and lazy hours … that didn’t really happen. Instead, the ideas — and the opportunities — exploded like pinatas, showering more candies than we could stuff our pockets with. A season of unexpected abundance.
Here’s one of the things we’ll be working on in this era of commencement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4yCYd8WY1w