Wherever you go, there you are.
It’s a life truth that many of us learn – some sooner, some later: No matter where we go, what we do or what we leave behind, we always end up face-to-face with ourselves.
We are a mosaic of the choices we’ve made, the people we’ve loved and the adventures we’ve experienced – in short, the life we’ve built. We are who we are. We change only when we really want who we are to be other than who we’ve been. Make sense?
In today’s paper, we tell the stories of two longtime teachers, both of whom separated from their jobs.
One, Lisa Goodhue, headed to Mexico and eventually landed in Malaysia. As Goodhue tells us in her story, she was suffering from burnout and need to make a change. For her, that manifested itself in a major move and transformed lifestyle. She relocated to a new continent, and recently returned to Peterborough to sell her home and all of her possessions.
Her plan? To be available for the next adventure.
Despite the many countries she has visited or called home, she is self-contained and thinks of her “place” as wherever she is.
“My place is just right here with me,” she says.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Another teacher, Deb McClure, is saying goodbye to the second grade at Pierce School in Bennington and transitioning into retirement.
The pull into retirement, she says, is her 2-year-old granddaughter in Atlanta, Georgia. “This place will always hold a special place in my heart, but I realized that I need to be there more.”
McClure’s change of place, while not as dramatic as Goodhue’s, brings her closer to where her heart needs to be.
As we mature and grow, we, like Goodhue and McClure, follow our true paths. It’s about looking inside, deciding what’s important, and taking action to align our life experiences with those priorities.