We Are Here For It by Lexie Wolf

I was surprised to find tears coming to my eyes when my friend Linda told me about her granddaughter’s upcoming graduation from Northwood High School. Family members are gathering from all over the country to celebrate. They were tears of both joy and sorrow. Joy that my friend is getting to celebrate a beautiful milestone surrounded by family. And sorrow because hearing it brought me right back to my own daughter’s depressing drive-through graduation from Northwood in 2020.

Why the heck am I still holding onto this, I wonder? India says she’s fine with it.

Some moments ask to be witnessed more fully than they are.

We sometimes move quickly from one phase of life to another with little pause to acknowledge what is happening. Children become adults. Relationships begin and end. Communities form and dissolve. We are often expected to carry on as though these transitions are ordinary administrative events rather than deeply human experiences.

Modern life is mostly lacking in rituals for change. And yet, instinctively, we keep trying to create them anyway.

This time of year, parents all over the country are sitting through kindergarten graduations, fifth grade “moving up” ceremonies, and backyard parties for children finishing elementary school. It’s easy to joke about some of it. Does an eight-year-old really need a graduation ceremony? Maybe not.

But perhaps these rituals are less about achievement than acknowledgment. A way of saying: this mattered. This season of life is complete. We were here for it. We saw you while it was happening.

Human beings need ways to metabolize change. Ceremonies, shared meals, music, storytelling, prayer. Moments that interrupt the forward momentum of life long enough for us to fully register what is happening. Ritual asks us to step briefly outside ordinary time.

Of course, not every important moment announces itself in advance. Most do not.

I was so moved by a passage in a novel I just read where the protagonist realizes she has no memory of the last time she picked up her child. At some point, without either of them knowing it, it simply happened for the final time.

So much of life is like this. We rarely recognize endings while we are inside them. The last bedtime story. The last family vacation before children grow up. The last ordinary season of our lives before something changes.

The same is true of beginnings. We rarely recognize them while we are inside them either. We do not know, in the moment, that we are meeting someone who will change us. Or beginning something that will shape the next chapter of our lives. I only vaguely remember my first yoga class.

Which is perhaps why practices of attention and presence matter so much. Yoga asks us, again and again, to come back to the present moment we are actually living.

This past weekend, we gathered for Yoga Garden’s closing ceremony. There was music, laughter, tears, and an overwhelming sense of gratitude. More than anything, I felt thankful that we had the chance to pause together and fully witness the ending of something meaningful.

And perhaps that is what ritual offers us at its best: not a way to hold onto things forever, but a way to pay attention while they are here.