The Quiet Before the Quad – The Calm Before the Chaos
Sunday morning. Early. You walk alone on campus, feel what's gone, and feel excitement about what's coming.
Construction is in its final stages—plywood and boards, sheetrock and plastic covering the floors, all soon to give way to showtime, go time. Students are about to board planes with one final destination: the 805 after a summer of giving their Visa cards hernias. Their tans won't disappear overnight, but they'll fade gradually as the leaves wait patiently for October.
Back in late May we scattered. Now, in late July, we re-emerge with stories to tell—of camps and Moon Dance, of the night a dozen of us stayed up far too late in a cabin, telling stories long past whatever curfew happened to be.
Say what you will about rhythm, security, and routine, but without an occasional timeout, they can slowly turn you into one of the walking dead. Sometimes you need a pipe dream or a bucket-list item that nudges you while you sleep and refuses to leave you alone, no matter how successful you are—or aren't.
Hence this walk after returning from a camp of 300 runners where we battled sweltering heat, popup storms, and constant changes on the fly. Think "Adjusted Schedule" day at our school, because there's always something.
Still, you've learned that sometimes you must release before you can attract, and the only way to make room—both physically and mentally—is to learn to let things go. So you find yourself suspended between memories of years gone by and moments that haven't happened yet.
Fall practices begin tomorrow. Football shoulder pads, volleyball knee pads, softball gloves, and cross-country spikes will replace 50-proof sunblock, sunglasses, and beach chairs where the waves quietly washed over your feet.
Summer breezes prepare to exit stage right, replaced by whistles, starting guns, and horns signaling the ends of quarters and games.
Everything is a circle - continuous. Ironically, though, sometimes you have to stand in the very center of it before you're ready to begin going around again. You look down at a football field, a gym, a track, and the softball field that ties them all together.
Photography, art, numbers, equations, graphs, charts, Smart Boards, presentations—they all seem to hover around you. Not in a threatening way, but because you are here of your own choosing.
And this silence now—necessary as it is—and these fresh, clean carpets and freshly painted walls are about to be assaulted. Hurricanes do their damage in hours. Kids do theirs in quiet rains, one day at a time, one class at a time.
So you take one last look at the coming fall, wondering whether these short summer months have prepared you for what can never truly be controlled.
Then you walk into a building that already echoes with kids pounding up and down the stairways, footprints that will forever be etched into your memory.
Ready or not...
