On The Road

The journey is odd, difficult, and strange. At times, however, it is beautiful. The larger pictures of the universe come together and, for a moment, they make sense and put everything into perspective.

I was at lunch with members of the search committee when I looked up and see a young man from Sudan. He was eating alone and I went to talk with him. He graduated from a school in Louisville and had one of my old students as his history teacher. Coincidence. Then I looked to another table and a father of another of my students was eating. He had visited me in Syracuse when his son was looking at colleges in the northeast. I jumped up and, seconds later, his son - who I taught - also came in.

Andrew was in my class the last year I was teaching in Louisville and was a stellar student who I cherished greatly. We've kept up over the years and on days when the sun breaks through the Syracuse gray, I always think of him because his last name means "God" in German. He is finishing a physics degree and, because Cat Stevens united most of the Brown School graduates, I post "On The Road" to remind me of the crazy coincidences of moving from here to there and how, retro to karma, reunions arrive at just the right time.

Such signs are meant for us to interpret and, when we're lucky, they present themselves just when we need to think more deeply about the journey. This post is for Andrew. We're all on the road to find out. I am thankful that "finding out" meaning in the infinite cosmos is aligned at times to provide us a little more sense.