Change Is In The Air

Dear all,

Rain clouds one moment, brilliant sunshine the next - it must be Edinburgh in May.

Several notices this week...

Lunchtime mindfulness drop-ins continue today (Friday) and next week, 1.10-1.50pm, before we end on Friday 22^nd May for the academic semester. Drop-ins will begin again on Monday 14^th September.

In the new academic year, I am thinking about bringing back the online Tuesday lunchtime mindfulness drop-in, for students and colleagues across campuses who I know can't always make it in on a Monday or Friday. Please reply to this email with a quick 'yes to Tuesdays' if this is something you would like to attend.

The final Community Class of the academic year will run next Friday 22nd, 3-4pm. The theme will be Endings, with a focus on grounding and gratitude practice. Do come along.

If you can't make in-person sessions over the next week, you are welcome to check out the practices in our Library of Guided Practices. (A quick shout-out to Seb Coke, our Admin Assistant, for transferring dozens of practices from Zoom over to Media Hopper in the last couple of months. These have been viewed 70,000 times in the last few years, so we were not going to let them disappear...)

I'm delighted to let you know that I'm launching a Student Support and Wellbeing Journal Club this summer (flyer attached), for all staff in student support, wellbeing and experience roles, and interested others across the UoE. We will meet to discuss up-to-date qualitative, accessible research that explores the complexities of work on the ground supporting students. Email kitty.wheater@ed.ac.uk to join the mail-list: our first meeting will on Friday June 19th.

The MindLetter will continue across the summer, keeping you company at your desks, unless I'm on leave.

For this week's essay, I was holding in mind all those navigating beginnings, endings, and change.

Change Is In The Air

Every morning I walk the dog along quiet back roads furnished in green. Larches whisper, lime trees pulse in the wind, willows are leafy with promises of summer. Yet for all the green in the hedgerows, so many of the flowering trees and shrubs are decked out in cream: the eponymous May blossom, pale hawthorn, speckled with pepper stamens; rowan, its red berries not long since squashed underfoot, but now bedecked with white; service trees, flowering dogwood, whitebeam, laurel.

Spring is lit in green and white, but only lately it was a flood of pink on the cherry trees. The cherry blossom on the Meadows, in Portobello, in Morningside, is something of an annual marker. Its few luscious days punctuate the lives of Edinburgh residents with the rhythm of a clock. Come down with a mis-timed flu, and you’ll miss the cherry blossom for another year. But visit at the same time you did last year, and you’ll spot something you didn’t expect: the cherry blossom, moving earlier, a day here, a day there, as each year goes by.

The beat-shifting rhythm of the cherry blossom marks continuity, but also change. Each year as I descend Middle Meadow Walk sometime in the last week of April I think of Jennifer Thomson’s joyful Blossom Time on the Meadows. Memories stir from the visceral places of our minds: that walk, that conversation, those previous flowerings of densely-packed pink petals, immaculate delicacy, ‘pink perfection’. If spring is a reset, it is also a breach. Things are not as they were; we are not where we were. Sometimes this is frightening. Sometimes it is a relief.

As change is in the air, long-time students of mine are leaving; voluntarily-severed staff make their farewells. Some are choosing change, others are fearful that it will be forced upon them. For some, fears and worries grow arms and legs, take over sleep, meal-times, relationships. The hardest voices are those from the deep that clamour dully, a doom-tolling cacophony, as if they’d been there waiting all along. ‘You won’t cope.’ ‘You were always going to fail.’ For others, the unfolding of events feels possible to metabolise: quiet time, and leaning into senses of stability and connection in other parts of life, gives change a prospect of growth.

What is growth, exactly? Little cherry trees, however severely pruned, sputtering forth sprigs of blossom; tight whorls of green emerging from the earth to become lupins; trees trembling with new leaves. The trunk of my local cherry, a modest sapling when I first arrived in this corner of Edinburgh, is thick and solid this spring. On the beach I examine oyster shells, some flat as flakes of flint, others ridged like contour lines on a map; each line is a year of growth, another pearlescent layer invoking treasure.

Wherever you look, a defining feature of growing things is that they fold the perplexing permutations of their lives into themselves. When a tree branch is felled, the tree grows new branches, to compensate, in places that balance its new shape. A changing life need not hold itself to the standard of the much-metaphorised oyster’s pearl, but the person who is navigating change might keep a quiet question at the back of their mind: how am I growing?

When change is unwanted, this is a hard task. Yet in the end, after all else has been exhausted – the reckonings made, the emotions voiced, the clothes rendered, the fire ashen – it is the only sane one remaining. Even if the only goodness to be found is the willingness to grieve, the affording of oneself dignity, or the bravery to acknowledge that what came before really mattered, the human emerging on the other side of that change will be growing new branches of a kind that one day they will find beautiful.

And if change is wanted? Here, too, we may need to hang onto our hats, for there are infinite ways to live a life, and each will unfold or not in a dizzying game of chance. Set your compass by what nourishes and sustains; on cold days and dark nights, remember to go slow, to make yourself dinner, to speak to those inner voices in the voice of your dearest friend. The turning of a season is both beautiful and relentless, but some things are for sure: by May next year, you will be in a different place; and for every loss you must grieve, there is goodness growing in the compost of your heart and mind.

Warm wishes, for luminescent wanderings in green and white this weekend.

Kitty