New beginnings

Last month I packed everything I own into two shipping containers. The makings of what was once my tranquil home were reduced to shrunk-wrap bundles and labelled plastic bins, stacked precariously into the steel cubes by friends who had popped in to say bye but ended up doing much, much more.

Prior to this, I might have said I was a minimalist. But the process of taking each object out of its place, asking if I had used it or really would sometime soon, seeing it placed in a box, stacking it on top of a semi-organized, increasingly gargantuan mountain—it was humbling. Time didn’t stand still, it swirled. The hours that I needed slipped by too fast, and the moments of incredible overwhelm stretched on. I’ll never get it done. It won’t all fit. I don’t even have a parking permit for these stupid cubes.

I make it all sound bad, but only a few weeks later, what I remember most vividly is the friend who came by with lattes and white chocolate matcha cookies to disassemble the bed. A partner who patiently helped wrap my surfboard with pool noodles and packing tape. How my dog’s only concern in all this chaos was not being forgotten and left behind. When my empty apartment was full of people who didn’t mind sitting on the floor, or on patio furniture dragging inside, for a final drink. And the last time I stood out on the roof and took in the view of the city I had grown in and had grown to love.

Still, even with those moments, why do it?

For me, it was for a new beginning. For the opportunity, the fortune, of purposely discovering a new place. The chance to go out and explore something different, to take one last moment to treasure pieces of a routine that feels like home, and to use that moment as the seed to rebuild new routines and a new home.

In so many ways, it reminds me of what we do every day. We’re an organization of beginnings. We nurture beginnings, we revere beginnings – we surrender to throwing things away and starting again. Montessori wrote, in a passage that was meant to include both young human beings and young human innovations, that “[i]t is not always imperative to see big things, but it is of paramount importance to see the beginnings of things.”

Youth is part of who we are as an organization. Most of our students are extremely young. Even the ones who are older are still in the midst of the growing pains that many adults are lucky to experience occasionally. Our organization is a few months shy of seven years old, with so much of our growth, hiring, and enrollment happening in the last half of that period.

Every day, we set up new schools, open new classrooms, present new lessons to new human beings. Beginnings—turbulent and beautiful, messy and miraculous—are core to who we are.

Here’s to big moves, and to new beginnings.

Happy Friday.

Maddy Channen
Senior Vice President of People