Preparing for never and someday at the same time

The car, so shiny and new in this picture, went to the junkyard — because they all eventually do. (State Library of New South Wales)

I have at least two complete drum sets in the basement of a house that I haven’t been able to set foot into in more than four months.

I miss playing drums. I miss playing music with other people in the first place. I don’t foresee a time or location in the near future when I’ll be able to play those drums. Maybe I can play others. But I don’t know. You can’t have drums in an apartment, right? So when we sell the house that the drums are in, do we sell them because we’ll never be able to play them again? Or do we put them in storage for someday?

I’m just as overwhelmed by what’s happening with my school buildings. Like so many people, I’m paying for thousands of square feet of space that is sitting empty, month after month. Do I acknowledge that we’re never going back? Or hang on for someday?

When The Little Middle School starts its academic year, we’ll be online. How does it change the way we build community if we prepare for the entire year to be remote instead of planning for on-site learning? How does it alter the way we use resources or the rituals we engage in? Does clinging to the hope of “someday” impair our ability to make good decisions if the reality is “never”? On the other hand, does assuming “never” mean that we will be unprepared for additional changes as they come?

When I consider these questions, I realize that I’m once again looking for a definitive answer where there is none. If I let go of thinking that there is a right way to do it — or even a wise way to do it — I can set myself free.

Fine, we’re living in a tiny apartment. But it won’t kill us to throw the drums into a storage unit. I never said I wanted to be a minimalist. It also won’t kill us to sell the drums. Either way, we’re okay. Whatever decision I make is not a de facto statement about what I think is going to happen with the coronavirus or my philosophy toward material objects or a move sealing my destiny for the next twenty years. It’s just a choice, for now, among hundreds of such choices I must make.

When it comes to my school buildings, I can treat them as a sunk cost and hang onto them, or I can try something different. Either way, as long as I commit to the path I’ve chosen, I can make it work. Business decisions don’t have to be emotional, and any path forward is full of possibilities if you can train yourself to see them.

When it comes to The Little Middle School, my best bet is to focus on the students. How do we create the best possible experience for them right now, in the current circumstances? What do they need? When we pay attention to their wins, their challenges, and their ideas, we can evolve toward an outcome that might not be possible to predict today. Maybe “remote vs. in-person” isn’t as important as it seems right now. Maybe we will come up with new ways of supporting our students that can apply to any setting.

So I can do what I believe is best for the moment and deal with the consequences later. Am I sometimes bummed out that, over a decade ago, I donated that pair of vintage corduroys with floral embroidery on the pockets? Yes. But my painfully good memory is the problem, not the pants. I gave them away, and life went on. Life is shaped by constant choices, large and small, that we make as we go, affecting our trajectory the way tiny movements of the steering wheel keep us on course as we zip down the highway. We’re going where we’re going, until we decide to go somewhere else; then, we’re still going where we’re going.

So in the end, I’m preparing neither for never nor someday. I’m just managing today as best I can. I’m making the decisions that seem like the best ones given the information I have, despite the fact that the future can never be predicted and I can never know how things would have turned out if I had gone a different way. “Someday” never comes — all we have is a succession of todays. And that’s enough for now.