directions

My hotel is in front of the airport in Nice, and directly behind it, the sea. I arrived here on Sunday, after a Buddhist conference in Marseille. The days since the conference have been spent finishing the semester's grading and responding to the desperate student emails with the hotel's dependably aleatoric wifi connection: a plane takes off and the connection ceases. I don't know if those of my students who are tardy in submitting their final papers would see that as a good metaphor for their attempts at communication. The thing is, I am so close in age to them, I understand their situations too well, so it is very hard for me not to be compassionate of their initiatory dramas and nascent tragedies. And so, together, we perform the dance that has been unfolding between professor and student with the seasons of every semester gone past, adding our own steps, leading each other towards a more delicate calibration of mind to heart.