“Whether or not you are conscientiously following your destiny, your destiny is always following you.” – Martha Beck

I have said this before, and I’ll say it again, education is a busy place. Some weeks feel like a whirlwind. Can you relate? It’s like that feeling when you’re driving to work, and suddenly you put the car in park and wonder how you even got there. The days are filled with rushing from meeting to meeting, professional learning sessions, and conversations with stakeholders, celebrating students and teachers while trying to identify and solve obstacles.

Sometimes destiny pushes us into spaces we need to be in, conversations we need to have, and people we need to meet. Destiny brings us full circle, running into people from our past and standing before them in the future, creating new stories that shape who we are becoming. This week, it felt good to see someone I had known briefly from the past and say, “It’s nice to see you again,” instead of, “It’s nice to meet you.” These moments remind us how our paths are always unfolding. As Karen Eber shares in her book The Perfect Story, “A great story acts as a roadmap, guiding your audience through information to build an idea, feeling, or inspire action. They act as an open door, inviting people to come through.” (p.16)

Every moment is an opportunity to shape our destinies, who we are and who we want to be. This week, I stepped into classrooms to teach, learn, and grow with our teachers. I always believe this sentiment holds true: Being in close proximity to where the learning happens is essential. Also, although it is not always possible, if we are asking teachers to implement instructional practices, as leaders we must do our best to roll up our sleeves and try them ourselves. Within classroom spaces, I saw teachers connecting with their students by responding to them in ways that would motivate them to keep learning in other spaces and meet their own destinies beyond the classroom.

This week, I couldn’t be in multiple places at once to deliver professional learning sessions, so I invited teachers with expertise in various areas to facilitate those experiences. Watching them step into leadership roles and shape their own destinies as natural leaders and lifelong learners was inspiring.

Then, this weekend, destiny found its way to me in the form of a text from a teacher who received a postcard I asked teachers to write to themselves at the beginning of the year with words of encouragement. I mailed those postcards this month. It was her surprise in receiving it this week, and my surprise in reading her message, was destiny at work. She shared words of encouragement I didn’t realize I needed at that very moment.

As my friend Megan Lawson says in her newest blog post, Glimmers, “Maybe this is how we positively impact larger scale change, one little corner of the world at a time.”

How we move through our personal paths is an example we are destined to set for others. Everything we do in life is paving the way for something we haven’t experienced yet.

“Whether or not you are conscientiously following your destiny, your destiny is always following you.” – Martha Beck

So, how is destiny showing up for you today? 

Let’s keep moving forward and see where it leads us.