The Space Trap: Compassion

This is the third part of our meandering from space through place to legacy. Last time, we played with the demon of place. Today we have another demon. What happens to the space we’ve been holding after we’re gone? This is not just a place question. It’s also a question of compassion.

As we built our network of charter schools, I was a lot older than most of the people on our team, old enough to be their grandpa. Although my retirement had always been five to ten years in the future, it was obvious that I would be retiring before the grandkids. For many, our network of schools was their professional home. They’d grown up with us. Many dreamed of spending their entire careers in our schools. How would our schools continue without me?

It was a tough question. We knew we were building something special. Visitors could feel it. Walking in our halls, sitting in on a class, they saw. “I’ve never been in a school like this,” they said. We were creating something special. We saw it when we attempted to on-board seasoned leaders with skill sets we lacked. More often than not, the newcomer failed to adapt to what our long-time lawyer called “our special sauce.” We realized that a homegrown successor had the best chance of holding the space. I spent a lot of time with our rising leaders to prepare them for my eventual retirement.

This story doesn’t have a happy ending. The board chose to go in a different direction. They brought in an outsider who, surprise of surprises, didn’t get our special sauce at all. It wasn't long before I heard the rumblings. We had been the space which welcomed the kids who struggled. We were the school of second chances for students and for staff. It wasn’t much later that the new guy began firing or forcing out most of our leadership team.

I could feel the pain. Not just for the grandkids. For me too. I’d imagined being able to drop by in retirement, just to see how the younger generation was doing. I blamed myself. I could have done a better job preparing the new leaders. I could have done a better job preparing board members for the transition, finding a way to give them a taste for our sauce.

Maybe I couldn’t have. Recently, the blame has been dissolving as I’ve begun to see the “space trap.” We had all been living in the happy fantasy that our harbor of nurturing and growth could continue. Maybe we, I, were asking the wrong the question.  We’d been asking, “What do we to keep this moment that we’ve had together going after I retire?” Maybe we should have been asking, “What do we do when this moment that we’ve had together ends?”

Maybe spaces, spaces of wonderful healing, arise through the convergence of energies, arise in a moment in time, and when that moment has passed, the space dissolves. Maybe it’s not about preserving the space but of cherishing the moment and, each of us, taking the energy of that moment into the next moment in our lives.