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Good morning. It’s that time of year again. The Tuesday after the August bank holiday; summer holidays are over. Very soon it’ll be back to school. For those of us without children the first clue is all the adverts for school uniforms. Getting kitted out for a new term is a lesson in life. There’s repetition in the cycle of one academic year after another, but also growth in the fact that clothes bought just 12 months ago no longer fit and require replacement. My mum always got around this by buying uniforms several sizes too big for me that would last forever. In yesterday’s Guardian, the philosopher Julian Baggini observed that life can appear forward moving and linear when it is in fact cyclical too – and that we’d do better to appreciate the rhythms of here and now rather than fuss over the distant future. As a Christian my mind immediately turns to Ecclesiastes, where it says: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” This passage is popular at funerals partly because it talks about “a time to die” but also “a time to be born” – reminding us that birth and death, like summer and winter, are not the end but part of a cycle. It seems to say to the mourners: “Take comfort.” Life goes on. But life does change, or at least our experience of it does. As an eleven-year old I felt as if school would never end – that it was a life sentence. But as a seventeen year-old, close to graduation, it suddenly seemed finite. That was a relief. I disliked school, so much so that I played a bit of truant. But when school was over I had to get a job to fill up a gap year, and what did I pick? Classroom assistant. Overnight I went from a child who broke the rules to an adult who had to enforce them. It was terrifying. The children smelt blood, order broken down. Maths with Mr Stanley was like Lord of the Flies. The apostle Paul writes “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” And now I think of school not as a prison but as a place of wonder where children are incredibly lucky to be studying things I never knew, have forgotten, or my brain is now too old to take in. Think of what books they will read, what mysteries they shall uncover! Hence life does move in circles and seasons, but within them we grow as personalities. If we work hard enough, we might even become better and wiser people.