As I was listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing Christmas songs, my eyes drifted to a quote that hangs above my computer desk.  It contains some earth-shaking words written by Thomas Merton in his "No Man Is An Island":  "Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be? If only we knew what we wanted. Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”  Some questions!  I had been consciously asking those questions since my epiphany in the fall of 1991.  I found that they don't just shake, they shatter.  And, to make sure I don't let anything settle, I put them up there to read each morning as a constant reminder to struggle with my human imperfections in an effort to focus on living a life of constant astonishment and of daily epiphanies.
	
	This quiet, melodic, soggy morning I thought that if we could cut through this time of superficial light bulb celebration of flickering, blaring, glaring, blinking neons, fluorescents, halogens, CFLs, incandescents, and LEDS, to the essence of Chanukah, Christmas, Kawanza, and New Years, it would be in Merton's stirring-up words.

	You see, I know how they're spacious invitations to be reflective, to be contemplative, to be mindful of, to be alert to, to be aware of, to notice, to be awake to all things in your daily professional, personal, and social life.  Basically they boil down to ask the most challenging, frightening, and yet clarifying of all questions:  "What would you want to do, resolve to do, and do if you could do anything that you could do?"  

	It may seem to be a dangerous cross-roads question, certainly fraught with heartache and fear, for it demands you confront yourself with some serious choices.  It demands a quest for answers to a subset of questions:  Why am I doing this?  Who do I really want to be?  What do I want to really do?  What is my deepest identity that moves me?  And, then, "why am I not doing it?"  But, to shirk away, shrink into a dark corner, and not to ask, much less to seek honest answers, it is to languish in a dismal prison chained to a wall.  To ask and seek the answer with all honesty, to muster every fiber of your being to get rid of those enchaining things, to see that you have the courage and strength to break those shackles and open the cell door, ultimately is a releasing and liberating of a more loving, more believing, more hopeful, more caring, more joyous, more respectful, more honest, kinder, and more authentic person.  

	It's a letting go of and a sacrificing of the "I am" person for a "I want to be" person.  It's putting a smile on what was once a long, morose, grim face.  It's a process of becoming your own, while shedding someone else's, person.  It's getting off your butt, meeting yourself where you are, facing your human messiness, taking yourself by your hand, and leading yourself to where you want to and can be.  It's filling your shallowness with a fullness.  It's putting flesh on your most secret yearnings.  It's going through your own three Dickensonian Christmases.  It's what Joseph Campbell called following "your bliss."  

	Trust me, it can be pretty amazing stuff, scary as it may be, when that happens; it can be life-changing.  Having faced up to those questions, the answers somehow kept me in academia, or, as a student once told me, "you luckily found your place in the very place you were standing."  Yet, it was both the same place and a different place, for slowly my answers took a surprisingly willing me out from the archive into the classroom, away from wanting to be important and professionally renown to doing things of importance and little renown, away from scholarship to teaching, away from being a professor to being a teacher. 

	But, it never ends, especially for me at this time and place.  After having reluctantly retired in December, 2012, I've had to go on and have been on an adventure to uncover a new set of answers for and from a very different place.  Everything I do, everything I contemplate, everything I share, everything and everyone of which I am mindful is part of an ever-searching, never-ending journey.

Make it a good day

-Louis-


Louis Schmier                         		http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org       
203 E. Brookwood Pl                         http://www.therandomthoughts.com
Valdosta, Ga 31602 
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