At the Crossroads: We Say Goodbye to 2025

Between the crossed frames of life, experiences accumulate like water drops on a window pane, with transparent intentions, pooling into memories made nostalgic.  2025 marched in procession toward cosmic convergence as ghosts of the past wrestled with specters of the future, whispering enigmas riddled with finality: “What burdens you shoulder at the next turning, fragments consign to shadows behind, so what light is ahead of you?”

My answer: “Reckoning.”

In a world of memes, the crowd affixes labels and recognitions. Some appear weighty and grand, while others are petulant or cruel. In a year that would bestow recognitions like “Teacher of the Year,” reaching the standing of “finalist,” I, half in self-deprecating jest and half in confession, claimed the title of “Ultimate Loser.” While flattered and appreciative for such recognitions, they are but fleeting laurels deigned as signposts that neither resolve nor define. Little did I realize how synchronous my words would become — it was my last year teaching, the ultimate indeed.

Nonetheless, it was an invisible honor for those who performed the real labor that went unseen in unmeasured hours: students who worked to perfect their writing, who asked questions and heard the answers, and who sought faith and hope in themselves—the great life-myth worth living.

To provide the necessary space and opportunity, I symbolically kept my door open even at the least opportune times. Early mornings, prep periods, class periods, and late nights included, but then the ghosts and specters converged.

Perhaps by the requisition of such cosmic probability, or by indifferent happenstance, my nervous system spoke with thunderous accusation, “No, no more.” At times, unable to walk, I had to reassess the weight I could bear. The litany of symptoms hit me one after the other, but remained beside the point — at the crossroads, what mattered was that I became an apprentice to fatigue, attention, and humility.

Amidst these challenges, I slowed down, and in deceleration, it became easier to see the revelation that comes by narrowing the eye rather than widening it. Wisdom came as limitation instead of youthful grandiosity.

I mentioned accumulation. And in this example, these acute pains and insights came at the end of five years, where my eyes saw the operating table, fire, pestilence, floods, and migration with deaths and near misses — if that’s not revelation, I don’t know what is.

Each experience forced me to adapt. After my nervous system broke down from chronic and latent stress, I had to relearn basic movements—literally watching where I placed each step as I walked. I couldn’t rely on my old teaching habits anymore. Instead, I had to translate them into a more sustainable self-story: I thought that meant I’d return to teaching but with greater discernment.

Sorting through this series of constraints, I received a phone call. A new opportunity. A new job. A new place. With what acuity I could summon, I said, “Yes.”

It was the end of formalized teaching. But not everything that ends does so in defeat; some things conclude because the form that held them could no longer bear the weight.

As such, I left teaching at a relatively high point. And leaving is not easy when you look into the eyes of the students who have come to rely on your presence. While the specter’s “promise” awaits, the ghosts channel memories of failure:

Times where I challenged a student too much, failed to capture the imagination of the talented, gave a group too much freedom to choose, pushed forward with a lesson when a student needed a different answer, forgot their name when they just wanted to be remembered, over-paced students across complexities that felt like eccentricites at best or complications at worst, overwhelmed the ignorant and innocent with reality’s darkness and dilemmas, or even just leaving a student orphaned by the system, without the closure or certainty they felt they so desperately needed ... ghosts. So. Many. Ghosts.

But I always listened, took it to heart and mind, and changed what and how I taught every year. I even publicly threw out entire unit plans that were failing the class and guided students in deciding what would come next. We moved forward.

What else could I do but press on?

But to make a good decision in the now, my crossroads required ghosts exorcised and specters dismissed. I chose to leave teaching, and consequently, the world got bigger, but I had no idea how much bigger it would become.  

An opportunity to reuse sharpened skills while sharing a new, beautiful building of possibility, edified not merely for me but for those who clamor for attention above the din.

Despite shifting roles, former students resurface in the most interesting of places, colleagues extend hands across chasms of time and geography, and names once familiar return in the strange light of a new season.

This peculiar continuity, more than any accolade, job, or title, is the true accumulation — the accumulation of life, which testifies to shared labor in classrooms, on productions, among books and films, wrestling with questions and ideas that refuse neat resolution; like waves along the shore.

If teaching once gave me a room, writing now gives me a threshold. As I return to writing, deliberately in a time where reading eyes are scarce and time is fleeting due, at least in part, to the seductive temptations of beguiling idols demanding worship with nothing more than a gaze and a swipe, I attend to the crossroads. And the recurring choice therewith.

Most of us … really, I believe all of us … find ourselves at such liminal junctures. It isn’t failure, but reassessment, a preceding and proceeding accumulation. The threshold is here, call it 2026, call it whatever you deem, but the road itself reminds us all that the burden and privileged path is ours.

For those asking: I am here, writing, thinking, learning, and healing. Sometimes the names and faces are different, sometimes they’re the same, but no matter the classroom walls, abstract or not, the teacher’s labor requires attending.

If you are uncertain (note: not all uncertainty is doubt), you are at a crossroads too. Be mindful. Be present. It’s a moment. And such moments are not digressions, but invitations that beckon you to choose carefully with accumulated clarity, charity, and courage.

May you accumulate clarity, charity, and courage so that you may choose with care.