Four Years' Worth...

I've had weekend-long sessions at my healing school (which I still would like to blog about some time...) in Meadville (which is in the upper-left-hand corner of Pennsylvania, as opposed to the lower-right corner where Deb and I live) for the last four years. Roughly six or eight sessions a year.

I graduated from that school last weekend. It was a marvelous experience that touched all participants quite deeply. And I want to blog about that as well. (I will be attending the school for at least one more year as a graduate. It's all rather complicated...) But that's not what I want to write about this morning. Not exactly, anyway.

When I go to the school, I make it a habit to take a backpack/satchel gizmo with me. I picked it up at an annual convention of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Nice logo on the pack, and wonderfully useful. I keep several notebooks in it, along with papers relevant to the school, plus pens, a book of Sudoku puzzles, my checkbook and my datebook/calendar.

And when I get to the school, I empty my pockets into the pack: my wallet, my cell phone, my car keys, and whatever coins I've brought with me. When the school session starts, it's important to me (for reasons I don't fully understand) to have empty pockets.

When I get ready to leave the school, I retrieve my wallet, phone, and car keys -- but I never retrieve the coins. Probably because I'd have to pull everything else out of the pack to get to them, since they're all lying at the bottom.

Anyway, yesterday, I decided to do just that: pull all the paper out of the pack and retrieve the quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies that have accumulated there. I'm sure there was $20 worth down there, and it might well have been $30. It didn't seem to be necessary to count it...

I spent a moment looking down at the money before I started hauling it out, thinking about how much weight the coins had added to the pack through the years. And the phrase came to mind: "Four years' worth of change."

And then I thought about how deeply and in how many ways the school has helped me open and redirect my life over that time. And I thought about last year's illness and its attendant treatments. And how much that experience has changed me. And how my marriage has become a stronger and deeper experience. And how my golf game has improved. And how much learning and playing my electronic keyboard has meant to me. And on and on...

And then I thought: "Yup, four years' worth of change. That's about right."