I’m up early because it’s the first day of school. The thing is: I no longer have a first day of school. But for nearly two decades, the Wednesday after Labor Day in the United States was my first day. Oh, we were already in the thick of it, as librarians and instructional technologists, by the time the first day of classes rolled around, but it was the marking of time, the official signpost, that lived large in my head. As with many things, the body and mind keep the score, and so this morning, my body knows that it’s the first day of school and is excited, restless, in waiting mode. Old habits do indeed die hard.
I was thinking about this as I woke up today, and my first impulse was to reject it: I don’t do that anymore, time to unlearn that marker. But my brain loves anniversaries, and old conditioning is sticky, with me. I know that. I spend a lot of time being frustrated by it, until I remember to step back and be curious about it. So this morning I asked myself: what if you just accept it?
That got me thinking: is there an Oblique Strategies card for this? And it turns out, there’s a pretty good one.
The Oblique Strategies bot on Mastodon is one of those things that kind of putts along in the edge of my awareness most of the time, and then bops me on the head with help when I least expect it. And it turns out, it had shown this card, “Overtly resist change,” a few days ago. I followed this bot just for the hell of it, and didn’t come to understand the history of Oblique Strategies for some time, but as I’ve met people who also think about and use them, I’ve become fond. Both the original card sets and various digital versions have been around for a long time now.
So in the spirit of overtly resisting change, what can I do with today, and with a brain that marks the anniversary of a first day of school that isn’t mine anymore? Well, I can start as I mean to go on, for one thing: by thinking about what I want to get out of the time ahead, as if it was a new school year: by doing things to set myself up for future work, by nurturing the parts of me that love to buckle down and get into it, by cataloguing my hopes for the future.
Here, get your own Oblique Strategies pick. Happy first day of school.