One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, “This too shall pass.” I used to think she meant only the bad things, but as I have gained more experience in life, I realize that she meant everything.

Sometimes change happens fast. Sometimes it happens in slow motion. Sometimes, it just happens.

As I have been getting ready to retire, effective at the end of June, I’ve been experiencing these differing velocities of change.

Sometimes there’s a party and appreciative words. Sometimes I just think, wow, that’s the last time I’ll be doing that. Sometimes I sit there as we’re celebrating the start of a new person’s assignment, and I have gooey sentimental thoughts about beginnings and endings, totally banal, but hey, it’s my turn to have them.

Sometimes I feel like the roadrunner who’s run off the cliff and doesn’t yet know to fall down. Sometimes it’s just a slow metamorphosis into irrelevance.

As long as I figure out which one it is right now, and appreciate it for what it is, it’s another chapter in the adventure.

One other thing I am not doing any more of — writing a regular monthly column for this newspaper. This is the last one.

The last several years of monthly columns have been a gift, and I thank my original editor, Naomi Schalit, and subsequent editors, for asking me to write and then letting me continue to do it.

I have learned a lot from this assignment. I’ve cultivated a way of approaching difficult issues that works for me, and that resonates for some of you.

Writing a “point of view” column is especially challenging. What is it for? What are you supposed to be doing? Recently I read something that I like a lot: In writing editorials, you are not going to convince anybody who reads them of anything new and different. Instead, you are conveying to those who already agree with you how they could be thinking and speaking about the subject. That’s a pretty good goal, and I hope I did that, at least most months.

There are many things I did not do in my writings. I didn’t finish telling you about how to fix education. I didn’t tell you how I’ve felt recently about the Red Sox. Well, but this is a family newspaper. Actually what I would have said about the Sox would have been connected to the subject of hubris, a major human failing of overweening pride and challenging the gods, and the resulting downfall, often made obvious to all by means of sporting events.

Actually hubris applies pretty well to recent attempts at fixing education, too. It just sometimes takes longer to spot it.

I hardly wrote about politics. Well, no, I was always writing about politics; but I hope I did it in such a way as to go beyond party labels and get to the human truths that lie behind some of the issues of our day.

Thanks to everyone for your kind comments, your appreciation and especially your disagreements. On the occasions where we had further exchanges, we often realized how much we had in common, in spite of the fact that we may have started out thinking the other was a totally ridiculous fool.

I have only one editing complaint. Listen up, dear editors: There is no such thing as a “nor’easter.” It is “northeaster,” as any true New Englander should know. How can you say “nawtheastah” if somebody puts an “r” right in the middle of the darn word? “Nor’easter” must be a locution made up by somebody from away — far, far away — trying to sound nautical and authentic and down-home. Ack.

It’s like a linguistic invasive species, verbal kudzu. There is a sou’wester, but that is a piece of rain gear, not a meteorological phenomenon.

OK, end of complaint. I’m moving on. Maybe one of these days I’ll start a blog. If you want to know about it, send me an email and I’ll put you on the list.

Don’t expect anything right yet, though. I have to move out of my house and my office, get connected to the Internet at “camp” in Mount Vernon, and spend some time in the garden, plus rowing, traveling and generally getting ready for the next set of adventures.

Perhaps in September, when everybody else is going back to school and for almost the first time since I was 5, I’m not, I’ll be in touch.

Theodora J. Kalikow is president of the University of Maine at Farmington. She can be reached at [email protected]