The Melancholy of Departure, Giorgio de Chirico, 1916
Standing in the door of the Pink Flamingo
Crying in the rain
Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, Soft Cell ‧ 1981
Please Exit Through the Gift Shop
Those readers of the Column of a certain glam rock disposition will be familiar with Poison and their 1988 hit, Every Rose Has Its Thorn. It is a well worn idea that the most beautiful or desirable things in life have negative aspects or challenges associated with them. Nothing is perfect and even the best of times can come with difficulties or drawbacks. At this point in our Column it would be remiss of your Director not to mention that whilst the rock power ballad certainly has its merits, it is not botanically accurate. Roses do not have thorns, they have prickles, which are sharp outgrowths from the epidermis of the plant. Thorns, on the other stem so to speak, are technically modified branches. Still, I think we can all agree that ‘Every rose has its thorn…’ scans better than ‘Every rose has its prickle…’ And as it garnered the band their only Number One hit, I think we can forgive their loose grip on the botany.
As we sail through the final week of the school year, your Director’s thoughts are often to be found wandering the streets of Opposite Town. Oxymorons are everywhere at this time of the academic calendar. We are saying hello to the long summer break, full as it is so often hoped to be, with sunlit possibilities. At the same time we are also waving goodbye to students, classrooms, offices and, not least to colleagues. It is a bittersweet time. As you will know, dear reader, there is nothing good which doesn’t contain a shadow side and the same is true in reverse. Today’s paltry words then are given over to exploring the wonderfully contradictory nature of existence where opposites don’t just attract, they inhabit the same spaces.
Without getting all mindfulness on you, dear reader, every real ending is also a beginning. Not in a trite “as one door closes, another opens” way but in the deeper sense proposed by certain philosophers and mystics who insisted on the coincidence of opposites: the idea that what seem like opposing truths like endings and beginnings, loss and gain, goodbyes and hellos are often the same thing.
Nicholas of Cusa wrote in the 15th century of the coincidentia oppositorum, the unity of contraries; how the infinite and the finite, the known and the unknowable, inevitably converge. Friend of the column, Heraclitus, several centuries earlier, argued that the way up and the way down are one and the same. Or as he might have put it: ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή. He’s not denying the experience of difference but he is pointing out that direction is relative, and that motion is inseparable from its opposite. The road going up the hill is the same road coming down it; it’s a single path, whose meaning depends on your position, your direction, and your moment in time.
This reflects his broader belief that opposites are not contradictions but complements, or interdependent aspects of one unified reality. You can’t understand light without darkness, or waking without sleep. As another friend of the column, Alan Watts has argued, you can’t have mountains without the valleys in between them. Similarly, beginnings and endings are not strictly separable. One contains the other. You can’t ascend without having descended, and vice versa. So when we experience an “end” (leaving school, saying goodbye), we are not stepping off the road, but continuing on it, just in a different direction.
In contemporary thought, we find echoes of this idea. Eliot puts it more elegantly in Four Quartets: What we call the beginning is often the end. / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from. You don’t need a theology degree to recognise the truth of this; you just need to live it. Every time you finish something you thought you understood, be it a school year, a beloved book, a significant friendship, or a distinct phase of life you emerge blinking into something new and unfamiliar. It’s something you didn’t consciously sign up for, but are now unmistakably part of. It’s the disorienting, exhilarating sensation of stepping onto a new path without a map, trusting that the ground will hold even as the old landscape recedes.
This, of course, is the real reason why endings matter. Not because they mark the finish line but because they change the shape of what comes next. They are thresholds, not tombstones. We don’t exit so much as cross over, even if the thing we cross into is simply a long summer of sun-drenched possibility and unexpected stillness, a chance to breathe and reflect before the next chapter truly begins, and an ominously looming new timetable.
Still, it’s hard. And it should be. If you’ve spent any time truly investing in a place, a community, a class, a person, then leaving hurts. That pain is not weakness. It’s the mark of connection. It’s the natural consequence of shared laughter over baffling exam questions, collective sighs of relief after a tough week, and the quiet fulfilment of seeing someone finally ‘get’ that difficult concept. These aren’t just moments; they’re threads woven into the fabric of who we are, both individually and as a community. To feel that ache is to acknowledge the depth of the imprint left upon us, and the one we’ve left behind. A clean break is never a real one. We don’t end things like books, with a neat full stop and a satisfying twist in the final chapter. We end more like poetry: ambiguously, tentatively, with white space at the edge of the page. The resonance lingers, a quiet echo in the mind long after the final word. Although of course, all good stories will linger with us long after the so-called final word.
Schools, perhaps more than any other place, teach us this rhythm. You arrive wide-eyed and overwhelmed, and by the time you feel you understand the place, it’s already time to leave. The desks get taller, the corridors shorter, the jokes better, or at least more elaborate. And then suddenly you’re signing a shirt you last washed in Year 9 and wondering how your name got smaller while everyone else’s got bolder. And we, as teachers, watch this cycle unfold year after year, playing our small part in these constant transformations. We witness the blossoming, the struggle, the triumph, and finally, the departure, knowing that each ending plants the seeds for countless new beginnings.
To those of you leaving: thank you for the noise, the silence, the questions, the curious energy that makes a school a living thing rather than a concrete one. You leave behind not just a record in SIMS/Arbor, but echoes, impacts, the sort of legacy that resists easy quantification. Someone will sit in your place next year, but they won’t be you; and that matters. It always has. Your laughter and learning have shaped these corridors, and your absence will be felt, a quiet space where your unique presence once brought life.
To those of us staying: let’s not rush too quickly past the moment of parting. Let’s not numb ourselves with busywork or banality. Let’s allow the silence after the goodbye to stretch just long enough to feel it. Because in that silence, something new begins. It’s in the quiet reflection that we truly appreciate the journey just completed and gather strength for the one about to unfold.
Turns out the prickles aren’t just there as defence mechanisms. They’re the rose too. And perhaps they are there to teach us how to hold something beautiful with care.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Being up and down!
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Thorny Philosophical Question for the Summer Break!
If absence is not the opposite of presence but its precondition, can I claim to be most Director-like precisely when I am not writing the Director’s Column?
(Thorniness level out of 10? 0.0)