trainstations photos on Flickr

This is the last day of my summer vacation from work and I've had a really busy one. I went back home to spend time with my family in the first part, took care of some medical appointments, photographed two music festivals, went to Scotland, and on the days I was in Chicago, I started running at least ten miles along the lakefront path every morning. I'm honestly going to miss that part of my day the most.

I was never a runner before (though I do use an elliptical regularly and am an all year round bicyclist) but I love listening to music and seeing the clouds and the waves...just being a part of something vaster. It calms me down to witness it all every day. It sounds odd but checking on the sky to make sure it's still there...quite reassuring. At the end of the day, no matter how poorly it is going, we have to realize that the sky, the water, the mountains still exist for us to behold. How lucky we all are!

I always have some anxiety about returning to work. It's like the 4am scaries x 100. Of course, I don't get paid during my summers off so, even though I appreciate them, I do have a mortgage to pay. I think the hardest thing for me is just the neurological adjustment that I go through getting back into a work schedule but it's also intensely difficult for kids to come back, especially if they have some major screen addictions. Interacting with other humans in a learning context where they are asked to do things they don't necessarily find instantly gratifying is honestly less and less appealing to them as the years go by. When I first started my job in 2001, this was not as big of an issue and most students wanted to please their teachers. Now, it is almost as if many don't care about people in the real world at all and I can almost see a separation in young brains between a "screen world" and a "real world," the latter mattering far less to them.

Anyway, I have written before about how scary this trend is to me...and studies have shown with young children especially how they lose the number of words acquired with increased screen use and we're seeing a lot of decreased empathy in the schools towards others as well as an increase in violence when the screen is taken away or when kids are seeking out an immediate reaction. This is going to really change our world and I don't know if this trend will ever stop. What I am seeing as most common is that parents just hand over the screens for hours, even for young children and ADHD is also a really pressing concern. The children who have the most prominent ADHD challenges are the same children whose parents will tell me they are typically on screens for sometimes 6 hours a day (!)

So, these are the thoughts that go through my head when I have to readjust every school year. Lots of things I cannot control of all sizes. I'm going to ask the sky today what it's thoughts are but maybe the sky will be too busy moving all of those clouds around.

**All photos are copyrighted**

by Anna Tselemegou (on/off)

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Garub Trainstation by Lux Animae

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An old and empty trainstation that isn't used anymore, with some of the wild horses living around there.

Trainstation Bilbao by greet van dam

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Trainstation Bilbao by greet van dam

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Suburb by Peter Steinmetz

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