Places old and new

"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place," Azar Nafisi recalls telling someone in Reading Lolita in Tehran, "like you'll not only miss the people you love, but you'll miss the person you are now, at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way again."

This idea was on my mind this morning as we held our first church service in our new building. Many people, if not most of them, were excited about it. I was a bit trepidatious. There are new rhythms to figure out, especially in regards to the movements of my first grade class but also for things like how I sit in the chairs and where I will find people and how I can try to pick out the best hymnal without a hymnal cart. 

The transition will be made easier by the fact that the people are the same. Mostly. We're not the same, not entirely. An era has ended. A period of my life—of our lives—is over. A new chapter has opened. Still, we're heading into it together, and that's no small thing.

I feel strangely about this coming year. It swirls with half-seen possibilities (good and bad alike) in a way previous years haven't for me, in a way that make it seem appropriate that I have already done so many things I've never done before. I've eaten a goat cheese omelet. I've talked to several people I didn't know well, and purposely sat by someone I didn't know at all. I've worshipped at the new building, where I shared a hymnal with somebody whose name I didn't know. (These might seem like small things. Unless you know me.)

I loved the old building. There are certainly things I will miss. But I'm ready for the new one.