‘To Everything There Is a Season,’ We Learn

On the second morning after we returned home from a three-week trip to eastern Europe last summer, I opened the door to my office with a tremendous sense of well-being and relief. My desk was piled high with unanswered mail and unfinished projects and bills, and I surveyed them all happily.

The trip had been exciting, even memorable. We had planned it for months and will relive it for years. But the prospect of returning to a familiar routine was enormously attractive that morning, and I embraced it with gratitude. Jet lag was forgotten. I was ready to grapple with familiar, rather than exotic, problems and patterns.

I’ve felt a sense of wonder at that a number of times since, and this feeling came back to me powerfully over the past few weeks with the opening of school. First, my stepson started the seventh grade, then last week classes started at UC Irvine, a recurring event that changed my lifestyle drastically each October for 21 years--and is the only time I still feel a bit of nostalgia for teaching. And I’m beginning to question whether it’s the classroom I miss since I retired or the routine into which I always settled so comfortably.

Routine is the skeleton on which we flesh out our lives. Much as we protest against it--and we all do--we would disintegrate without it. We can yearn for excitement precisely because routine gives us a stable launching platform from which to seek it. I suspect that if our lives were all--or mostly--adventure (as, in a mild sense, our trip to Eastern Europe was), we would seek routine with the same passion that we normally pursue excitement.

There are certain events during the year--recurring events--on which we routinely hang our hats. Divested of them, we can quite easily get disoriented. I suspect most of us share some of these events, while others are quite individually unique. Here are some of the recurring rocks on which I build my own life structure.

The start of school has probably been significant in my life the longest. It has persisted from my own school days through those of my children to my years of teaching and, finally, to the school days of my stepson.

Whatever our role, all of our rhythms change on the day school takes up again. The laissez faire life of indeterminate bed and rising times, the slowing down of our living pace, the sudden slack in the stress of routines all disappear instantly when classes start. As a student, a parent and a teacher, I rejoiced when school let out in the spring and rejoiced again--especially as a parent--when it took up in the fall.

Then there is the change in time, which always speaks so inexorably to us. When the clock is turned back in the fall, we know there will be no more languid evenings shooting the breeze with the neighbors in the front yard or coming home from work in the daylight. Or need to de-flea the dog. Winter is imminent.

And when the clocks go forward in the spring, we receive the opposite message. Our routine suddenly opens up and the promise of the somnolence of summer is in the air. I’ve been surprised to find that this is just as true--if less dramatic--in Southern California as it was during the years I lived in the bitter winters of the Midwest.

The dropping of leaves from our back-yard ash tree always confirms winter for me. If I try to delude myself at the time change, I know when the last leaf falls that I have to shift to my winter routine. No more sitting in the shade of that tree to read or write. Both the lack of shade and the crisp air cuts off that option, and I have to rediscover my winter retreats.

And long before the time changes in April, I have my own private harbinger of spring. Since I’ve been a small boy, the most important regular event in my life has been the first day of spring training for major league baseball teams.

There was no mixed message here; all of it was affirmative. The baseball people knew that warm weather would soon be arriving, however dismal the scene out my window. And there would be a new season that always meant a renewal of life to me: the blackboard clean, to be written on fresh. Games to listen to on my radio. The comfort of the familiar and the excitement of the unknown season in a single package.

I once watched a beloved uncle die of cancer over an agonizing five-month period that almost exactly spanned a baseball season. Whenever I visited him, he was listening to a baseball game, and I remember thinking at the time that he should be immersed in profound philosophical and spiritual thoughts instead of baseball.

Maybe I just needed to be older, but I now understand why this comfortable routine gave him peace and provided a safe transition for him. I suspect when that time comes, I’ll do exactly the same thing.

Not all of these events that dictate the rhythms of our lives are positive. We will soon be entering one that I no longer look forward to--although I once did. The first Christmas decoration, which seems to appear in our shopping malls earlier each year, used to fill me with excitement. Now it mostly depresses me. I know I must soon shift into my holiday routine--and I’d rather not.

Parking places will disappear; routine shopping chores will turn into military expeditions, and I’ll be force-fed “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus” until I want to strangle both of them.

Christmas, itself, has become a kind of anti-climax to this commercial freneticism, although we have worked very hard in my family in recent years to make it as quiet and peaceful as possible.

I think the main reason I immerse myself for 10 hours in football bowl games on New Year’s Day is not so much the excitement of the games--which begins to pale before the Rose Bowl starts--as the relief in knowing that the holiday season is finally over. Sitting down at my desk on Jan. 2 gives much the same satisfaction I experienced when we returned from our trip this summer.

Although the opening of school set off all these musings, they are much more aptly summarized in one crisp sentence in Ecclesiastes, which says: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

I no longer resist those times. Good or bad, I embrace them.