In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela wrote, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”
Walking around Laurier’s campus as a full-blown adult was more than a little surreal. Finding a parking spot was certainly more challenging than when I attended in the mid-‘90s, but as soon as I entered the doors, it was like a younger version of myself was the one meandering the halls. Across the tiled floors, past the solarium, down the stairs and into the concourse. The Williams I would frequent was now a Starbucks, and there were laptops open on just about every table—non-existent in my university days—but the vibe was very much the same and I felt simultaneously at home and in another world.
When I arrived at the student services office, I took a number and dropped myself into a chair to wait. My name was called and I stepped up to the desk where a young woman who couldn’t have been much more than a student herself asked my name and turned to search through a box of files on the counter for what I had come to pick up. “Congratulations!” she said, handing me the certificate. “How does it feel to be graduating?”
“Well,” I replied, “It took me twenty-seven years, but it still feels pretty good.”
That was October 2024, but it was nine months earlier that I made a decision to go back to school and pursue a Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology. To be clear, it was Melissa’s suggestion, and it wasn’t the first time my wife had encouraged me to take the leap either. Somehow, the idea was always too big to wrap my head around. For starters, I didn’t even have the undergraduate degree I would need to begin a masters, as I had abandoned my studies back in 1997 when I decided to become a pastor. And then there were the questions of whether I still had it in me, how I would fit school into an already full life, and whether I really wanted to start a new career at my age—all legitimate but ultimately distracting questions.
A friend of mine who had recently graduated in the same field recommended an online program as a way for me to continue working full-time while continuing my education. I started the application process while communicating back and forth with Laurier about how to piece together the two years I had spent in the business program with courses I had taken since to make up an undergraduate degree. In the end, I had to take three courses over the summer term to meet the requirements for graduation, so with some help from my daughter, whose school I was bizarrely about to attend, I nervously navigated the online portal and chose my courses.
Here’s where I need to get honest with my readers and say that I failed in my commitment to give the deck of my story a good, honest shuffle as promised in the title of my blog. At the time, I knew this life transition was worthy of a real-time post, but the same sheepishness I would later feel when I was handed a certificate by someone half my age overtook me and I couldn’t bring myself to publicly acknowledge that I was going back to school at 47. I thought about making light of it with a reference to the ‘80s movie, Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield, but instead settled on streaming the film when I was home by myself one night, which was a reminder that some movies are better off left as memories.
The truth is, when I submitted my application for grad school, I had an intense feeling of personal pride, and I distinctly remember thinking that I liked this new version of myself better: the version that wasn’t afraid to step out in a bold new direction, who was ready to pony up a significant amount of money for tuition, who was willing to re-learn how to be a student, and who was prepared to set out on a new career path he knew next to nothing about. I’ve taken a lot of risks in my vocational life, but they were always part of some bigger cause. This was different; this was a risk I was taking on myself. And I started to love myself a little more because of it.
While I felt good about my decision and about this person I was becoming, I also felt ashamed that I was in this position to begin with. I was out for a walk with a friend one day and I let him know about my decision to go back to school, telling him it was embarrassing changing careers like this so late in life. He told me it was nothing to be embarrassed about and said he had something he wanted to send me when he got home. It was his mother’s obituary. A bit dramatic, I thought, but when I read it over, I understood why he had sent it: she had gone back to complete a masters in her mid-fifties and proceeded to spend the next fifteen years leaving a significant mark on the world. It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I realized that if I wanted to have a similar story unfold in my own life, I had to stop apologizing for the story I was writing.
The past few years of my life have been teaching me a lot about how to hold life loosely. A younger version of myself believed the best life was a long obedience in the same direction, and while that continues to be absolutely true in some ways, in other ways, it’s just not true at all. I have expanded my world so much since leaving the only job I ever wanted to have, and while I will never regain what I lost when that season came to an end, I have gained so much since that time. What was it Jesus said about giving away, only to receive “a hundred times as much”?
For three years, I had an incredible opportunity to facilitate personal development experiences with First Nations communities in western Canada, an opportunity that wrapped up last summer, although Melissa and I continue to dream about what it would look like to bring what we learned to our home province of Ontario—all in due time. I have also been working with older adults in both retirement and long-term care settings, work Melissa has done for years, but which is completely new territory for me. New people, new places, new opportunities. In an earlier post, I shared about the time I spent working with a career coach and the realization that I was drawn to people-focused roles with transformation at the core. This is ultimately why I chose to pursue graduate studies in counselling psychology, because it’s a vocational path that leads straight through the intersection of who I am and what the world needs.
But why write this post today of all days? Well, as it turns out, this is the first day on the other side of completing the academic portion of my masters program. No more papers to submit or online discussion posts to make—the “school” part of this journey is complete! Unless you’ve done something similar at this stage of life, you have no idea how good it feels to write those words. At the same time, the fact that I am up early on a Saturday morning writing this blog post shows just how fast the wheels have been churning over the past twenty-four straight months of school. I expect it might take a few days for them to wind down, which is fair. I really am grateful for this season of graduate studies, for everything I’ve learned about myself, other people, and the world of psychotherapy, but I’m ready to hit the ground and start practicing what I’ve been studying.
This program has taught me so much about what it means to come alongside people through the best and worst of what life can offer. In one sense, I’ve been doing this work for most of my life, but I’m learning how to do it in important new ways. For now, though, I have a much-needed break and then I begin the practicum segment of my degree where I will spend the next eight months practicing psychotherapy (aka counselling) under supervision. I have a dual placement, one with a clinic that provides masters students with an opportunity to offer free online therapy, and another where I will get to work with Indigenous clients, a population I have come to love and miss dearly since my work out west came to an end.
Being a therapist is what’s next for me, not to the exclusion of other things I am currently engaged in or have dreams about doing, but as the centrepiece to this second half of my vocational life. And I look forward to sharing more about the journey as it unfolds.
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