As I was carrying the boxes of art supplies from the classroom to my vehicle after tonight’s class, I was caught off-guard by the intense feeling of time gone.

The hallways of the building I taught the class in had art projects in glass cases along the walls. Some were students’ color theory projects. Some were graphic design samples. It brought to mind my days in college, and the strange silence of a visually loud art department late at night.

Sometimes, back then, I’d find myself working late, like many other students, but it was a deafening silence that led me to look over my shoulder as I’d wander through the large arts building into the music department wing where all the lights were off and the piano practice rooms were left unlocked.

Beautiful black baby grand pianos. Sitting silent.

For three semesters I spent many late nights playing the baby grand pianos. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to be there, but no harm was done and there were always empty practice rooms at that time of the night. I’d practice Chopin and limp through the first bars of some Rachmaninoff piece and wish I had larger hands and then move on to the music from the movie “The Piano” and when I would stop, the silence was that much louder.

I thought I’d have done things differently in life.

Last week, before class began, I texted a friend, saying that as I sat in the art room waiting for students to arrive, I felt like I didn’t use things — my education, my experiences — in life. I missed something.

If I really wanted to see the path my life took, I have a bookshelf full of journals in which I could sit down and relive it all in writing, drawings, and things like saved tickets and napkins.

I used to love starting a new journal. It held promise, I’d think, its blank pages carry the possibility of just about anything. I stopped enjoying the start of a new journal some time ago, and now I wonder what will have happened in life by the time I’m finished with the last page that will make me want to put it on the bookshelf with all of the rest of the journals and never open it up again.

I have a vague sense of reading a book or a poem about the thread running through our life and how it gets woven into something beautiful and all that loveliness, but I think it’s mainly a cord with a knot in it and has been all along. The cord is long, but twists back on itself repeatedly and goes nowhere. The path through the pages, after all this time, has led me right here.

It feels like a knot.

So I walked down the hallway in the silence, carrying my boxes of art supplies and looking at the art projects on the walls and thought that I had missed something important after all this time. The silence is so much louder now; it makes me wonder why I stopped making the music.