Time Machine

 Good morning, good afternoon and good day. I guess it depends on the time of day you are reading this blog. Whatever time of day it is, thank you for reading. I usually don't put one blog out right after another, but I wanted to stick with the "Coronavirus burnout" theme and try to give all of us a different perspective and help us deal with it. On my way in this morning, I heard on the radio, a gentleman speaking about his 8 year old daughter and her swim lessons. She had just finished a pretty tough lesson on underwater swimming and was pretty frightened during the lesson. On their way home, she was sitting in the backseat and said to her dad, "I wish there was a time machine". Dad found that interesting and asked her, "really, what year would you want to go to?". The daughter said, "not that kind of time machine, but one that would let me skip all the scary parts of life". Isn't that such a neat statement from an innocent child. It got me thinking though and it also reminded me of an old Garth Brooks song, "The Dance".

In the song, "The Dance", it says; "Our lives are better left to chance, I could have missed the pain but I'd have to miss the dance". I started to think how this pandemic is affecting all of us and could this just be a part of our life that later on we will realize how much we learned from it and how much we have grown from it. I'm not saying that I am glad we have the virus, but maybe we can look at how blessed we are with other things in our life, both before the virus and after it is gone. I know many of you have heard a little bit about my life and the family losses I have been through. Both my parents have passed on and I have lost five brothers and a sister. The individual pain of each one of them passing is tough to deal with, especially when they first die. However, if I was promised that I could skip the pain of my siblings deaths and funerals, but the stipulation is that they were never born...I would never ever accept that offer. I feel that way when I listen to "The Dance". I look back on the memories of my siblings and I can laugh and smile at some of the crazy times we had. I wouldn't trade them for anything. 

So, if we did have the time machine, I think we would all just skip over 2020. But was there a "dance" somewhere in there. For myself, I think of all the awesome things our administration has done to get us to this point and still be in school. I think of the closeness that I have gotten with some of my friends and colleagues. I see a group of teachers constantly reaching out to help others during these tough times. I am witnessing a parent/teacher conference like I could have never imagined. We are all doing these conferences remotely and it is going together absolutely incredible. I am sitting at my monitor with a headset on and watching four different conferences and seeing the passion our teachers have for these students. I could go on and on as I know you could too. Take time to think about some of the positives that you are noticing , and that maybe would never have happened if it wasn't for the virus, and write those down. I wouldn't mind hearing about some of those positives. I really do believe that our lives are better left to chance.