Hope

 It is breaking my heart to write this quarter’s newsletter.  I’m scrolling through old photos and old newsletters remembering the vitality that filled and surrounded Station Maine only a year ago.  I know that I am in the company of thousands of teachers and coaches and youth program staff who all love our jobs, love our kids, and want it all back.

But looking into the young faces in these photographs I cannot allow myself to be discouraged.  We owe this next generation the tools and the education they will need to face the task ahead, the task of rebuilding this planet.  We ( I ) do not have the right to rest on the laurels of years of work already accomplished.  Now, amidst a virus, climate change, and a certain political unrest, the young need to look up to a calm, if slightly lined and wrinkled, face and see the resolve to keep going forward.  They deserve to live out loud, to be safe, to learn, and to prepare to take their place in their community.

I know that I am not alone when I dig deep into my imagination and draw on my waning reserves of strength and courage to provide that education.  We are all struggling.  And because what is at stake is, literally, the future, I believe we will all find a way to educate this next generation, to give them light, to give them hope.  I believe this because to sacrifice that future is too high a price to pay for our lack of imagination.

So, I am going back to write my newsletter with new courage, buoyed up with the certain knowledge that in every town and village in the world there are teachers and coaches and youth program directors facing and solving these same problems.  Failure is not an option, and so we will succeed.