A few days ago, I went to Staples to buy office supplies. When I went to check out, I encountered a massive line of customers, many of them kids with their parents. I realized it was the first week of school and everyone in town seemed to be buying their school supplies on that very afternoon.
(On a side note, when I was a kid, we didn’t start school until September. When did August become the new September?)
Waiting in a long-ass line is always a great practice opportunity for me. I go through various stages of feeling irritated, considering walking out, projecting wildly onto the people around me, and wanting to strangle the old lady who is very slowly writing a check while 15 people wait behind her.
This time I immediately thought, “Just my luck, I picked the absolute worst day to do this.” But was it? As I stood in line, I watched the kids with their shiny new notebooks and pens, those cool black-and-white speckled Composition Books, boxes of No. 2 pencils… The smell of a freshly sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga pencil is one of my favorite smells in the world. It is the only thing that made taking the SAT bearable.
But before the days of SATs and college applications and all that really hard scary stuff, I actually used to love school. Not the Lord of the Flies-like socialization part of it, but the school part of it — the classes, the books, even the homework sometimes. And I loved that time in the early autumn when a new term was about to begin and I’d get new school supplies and school clothes, and I’d have a renewed sense of willingness. There was a feeling of possibility, new beginnings, a chance to start fresh.
I realize that getting jazzed about school may make me a freak. But we all have our own associations, and this one is a powerful one for me. So, as I stood in line at Staples, buying paper in preparation for a job that I was feeling a little less jazzed about, I thought about how I might approach the work as if I were jumping into a new school year. Maybe that means putting on a new “school outfit.” Or setting up a cozy place to do my “homework.” Or maybe it means sniffing pencils.
Just the idea of this makes the work seem like an adventure. Which, of course, it is.
