For “now” is all we have.
—Anonymous
The past few weeks have felt very surreal to me. The husband of a couple with whom I am close friends died abruptly and unexpectedly on my 63rd birthday (making two peer-aged people I’ve now lost in the last six months). The light pollution in Baltimore has reached the point where I can no longer readily see my beloved Orion on my pre-dawn run before school—traditionally my anticipated harbinger of the new academic year. M.I.T. just released a report demonstrating that AI can now successfully complete their collective undergraduate programs (meaning a non-human being could now theoretically earn one of their degrees). And for the first time in 29 years, I did not spend Labor Day weekend on a boat, sailing—an absence of a once seasonal closure that is impacting me more than I would have at first thought.
Indeed, such has been my recent sense of strangeness that I have even found myself offering no-longer-used items from my professional home library to colleagues out of a growing awareness that I am approaching the time when these things will never be used by me again, and the finitude of the ever-changing seems to be making its reality felt in ways that are more “vibrant” to me than in the past. I find my comprehension of this most fundamental truth shifting from grayscale to color, and I have now restarted this essay so many times I’ve lost count because I find myself feeling tenuous and nonplused, struggling for the words to answer that ultimate question: what does it all mean?
Ironically, part of what has made this sense of befuddlement all the more “in my face” has been the offer (and my acceptance) of a new position at my school to rebuild, renew, and run an academic program very similar (but more extensive) than the STEM Institute work I did at my previous school. So here I am, busy with highly generative work, at the very moment I find myself experiencing a deeper consciousness of my ultimate limitations, and for some reason, this long familiar paradox feels less abstract and intellectual right now than it has in the past. Perhaps for the obvious reason that I am far closer to the endings of various personal and professional journeys than I am to their beginnings. But I think there is something more at work here, something that needs to be informing my current teaching, and I think that “something more” may be that since the clock is always ticking, even a modestly meaningful life has a deadline to it.
And I think it’s this deadline’s reality for us all that may be what has been missing from what I’ve been doing in the classroom. As my regular readers know, I already consistently argue that good teachers are co-learners with their students and that, further, what we ultimately teach our kids is our perspective on what it means to be authentically human (the specific discipline is just the vehicle). However, what the recent surrealness has me pondering is: if I am trying to model fully what I think it means to be human but I’m leaving out both my finitude and how I choose to respond to that finitude, then what is missing from my modelling? What about the modest part of the quest for meaning might I be failing to nurture in the children under my care?
I’m not sure I have an immediate answer—especially since I have had some rather immodest moments of meaning in my career—but I’m reading a biography of John Adams right now, approaching both the literal as well as metaphorical “last chapter,” and am struck by how little I knew about this life of great consequence for our country. Here was one of the great intellectual architects of the American Revolution, without whom it might justly be said there would not have been one, and whose “failed” presidency enabled our suckling nation to survive the international fallout from France’s collapse into anarchy and terror following its own revolution. Yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, there are no monuments in his name, no image on a piece of currency. Just the quiet daily outcomes of the longest running experiment in democracy in history.
Which has gotten me to thinking. Perhaps I am modeling my finitude for my students after all—only not in ways I have traditionally thought of as “teaching.” For example, in my nearly religious commitment to punctual grading, I not only provide the speedy feedback I know the brain needs to learn effectively, maybe I’m also declaring via my behavior that I honor the limited time my students and I have together so let’s make the most meaning we can while we can (i.e. learn). Moreover, in my various pedagogical techniques employed for classroom management, I not only ensure that every voice has an opportunity to contribute, maybe I’m also providing the structure to challenge my students to achieve their best within the finite limitations of a particular day’s grouping.
Or to put it plainly, because I take a deeply student-centered approach in all my decision making as an educator, perhaps I am modeling the very reality Burkeman describes when he reminds us that:
Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you (p. 33).
The bottom line is that my students learn very quickly that nearly 100% of what we do in my classes is the result of a very deliberate, very reflective choice on my part, and even as I write those words, I am forced to realize that because my students know about that deliberation, they are also witnessing my own meaning making in action. Thus, while I’m still not sure I’m nurturing how my students can make their own modest meaning with their lives, it’s more likely than I originally thought when I first started this essay that I am at least modeling for them what modest meaning-making looks like for me.
And maybe in a finite world, that has to be enough.
Coda
As I said, writing this one has been challenging for me, with false starts and dead ends, forgetting not to fall in love with my own words (the writer’s worst mistake and most dreaded pitfall), and this final product rambles more than I like, making me hesitant to share. But remaining silent doesn’t feel right either, and sometimes the writing is the thinking (with—universe willing—more to follow on another day). Hence, as one of my favorite authors, Robert Fulghum, once did at the end of one of his books, I will conclude this latest offering of my thinking with a ;
References
Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
McCullough, D. (2001) John Adams. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Svrluga, S. (Aug. 25, 2026) AI Can Now Credibly Complete Most Undergraduate Assignments, MIT Warns. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/08/25/ai-can-now-credibly-complete-most-undergraduate-assignments-mit-warns/.
Light a Candle 