Teacher of knowledge and wisdom

My only memory of her is a yellow frock I used to wear to my kindergarten (henceforth nursery since that's how we used to call them in Kerala). I used to love it because she loved it. She was my first teacher. I guess she must have taught me rhymes, numbers and may be alphabets. My mother remembers that on my first day in nursery, I was so happy and liked her so much that I asked my parents to leave amid wails of children being ripped away from their mothers. After some months she left teaching to join her husband in the Gulf. I was heartbroken and wore the yellow frock to bid her farewell. Nursery was never the same and I stopped attending after a while.
New nurseries happened. I bid farewell innumerable times. Life moved. Usual and unusual things hardened heart and skin. I judged myself and others. I created and contributed to happiness and misery. I interpreted and analysed myself and others. I became convinced that “the other is misery”.
I have never understood any parting or meeting. Parting was relief, tears or numbness. Meeting was joy, dread or love. Are these beyond these emotions and feelings? I was going through many partings and failed to understand why they happened or what I truly felt. I had bowed down to God in my sorrow (not in belief). I trembled in my sadness and a curtain of tears fell over my eyes. I prayed because I was sad.
I met my teacher again. She recognized me, I did not. Amid all partings, I met someone whom I thought I had lost. This time she taught me the importance of being kind and respectful to oneself. She taught me to see and accept reality as it is. She taught me the importance of living and accepting the present. Not to worry too much about one’s own wickedness and virtuousness. She taught me the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
So where do partings and meetings happen? What do they mean? Each parting is a meeting and each meeting a parting? Something like that….