Why is it that in what still remains very much the city of the future I talk so much about the past? I notice how quickly everything moves. How everything is changing from moment to moment and I want to wait for what might be a good moment to write about what is happening. A moment when I have some sort of perspective. At first there was such a rush of impressions. I was always making a note of something to remember to get back to and expand upon later.
The Present
What just happened? It isn’t so much a matter of needing to expand on anything. It doesn’t matter what I write down, by the time I get back to it the context has changed. I tried to write about this in my last post. Once we say a thing, once we commit to it, then everything becomes organized around that. The official word may be all that we had time for. The conversation could have gone on late into the night until the decision made itself but there seemed to be no point. We know what we know and based on what we know we are going to do x. Y and z are for the future. For now we start with the known variable, which from what I have seen may be the thing someone who has been very silent throughout the whole conversation says at the right moment when people have grown tired of vacillation and back-and-forth. That person is the leader, the one who has been following what has been happening the whole time until everyone else has lost perspective, or said too much already.
The Future
We could say the leader is the president, the queen, the king, or the Wizard of Oz. If anyone in one of those positions would slow down the conversation and ask around, if they could find out what the people who have the least to say are thinking, they would know what their options were before they ran out of options. So who are the people that are saying the least in this situation, here, right now in the high rises surrounding our school Forest City? I would say the people saying the least are the people who do not have children attending our school already. They are the families with young children who were not old enough to attend this year but would have liked to.
All of the families with children old enough to attend our school are already attending our school so they have a lot to say right now about how we are handling everything in the light of the pandemic. We will go back and forth with them about how to manage the past and the present until the start of next year, when the people who wanted their children to be here all along have their chance. They will be the leaders. The families with the youngest children in our community will enroll their children at our school in the fall, as our community will have grown tired of going back and forth about the present and the past what we should do or could do by the time the new school year starts.
Our silent leaders have been waiting for future, and that is why we will add more children under the age of five than any other age group at our school. We will be living in the city of the future again. Of course, this is not privileged information. You have as much power to predict what is going to happen here as I do. I just want to put it on record before the context changes, and my perception becomes obsolete. We’ll meet in the future. We can play Follow the Leader.
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