I just put down Terese Amabile's THE PROGRESS PRINCIPLE.  In it she says that higher purpose leads to better performance, and better performance results in greater achievement.   That is, reflected upon work, purposeful work, meaningful work, is the single most factor in achievement; that loving what you do and doing what you love, that having a "why" for what you do, that caring about what you do, has an enormous impact on the proverbial "bottom line."  One passage I underlined said, "People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it’s not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it."  That's true for students when they ask, "Why do I have to take....;" it certainly is true for us when we ask, "Why do we have to...."

Chance or choice, that is the question:  Are we to be an actor merely reading the lines handed to us or are we to be a playwright penning our own lines?  I learned that what happens to me doesn't mean much; what I do with it does.  Do I obsess over how tough the challenge is and make it an obstacle or do I find the strength, courage, imagination, and creativity to work through it and make it an opportunity?  That is the question.  Our happiness or misery, our sense of meaningfulness or meaninglessness depends on our disposition.  Unless we want to be blown about haplessly by the winds of chance, we must live by choice, not chance.  We can make all the excuses we want, complain all we will, retreat into all the resignations all we wish, level all the blame we can muster, but as I finally admitted two decades ago they don't don't offer much; pride, belief, vision, meaning, significance, confidence, hope, and commitment offer a heck of a lot more.  We have control.  The question is whether we choose to use that control or not, whether we choose to be, as I help students to learn to be, our own voice rather than an echo of someone else's.  Sure, it's hard to stand up and resist that pressure.  Sure, it's easy to be safe and secure, to avoid conflict or confrontation.  Sure, it's easy to go along in order to get along.  Sure, it's easy to see it as a matter of personal and professional survival.  Sure, it's easy to do what others want in the quest to secure tenure, what a colleague called "the guarantee for a life-long job."  Sure, it's easy to rationalize that "once I get..." But, take heed.  As the easy, safe, comfortable, convenient short run lengthens and runs into the long run, as habits of "giving in" deepen and take hold; life becomes increasingly transformed from a "wow" to an unexcited "ho-hum" and/or to an anguished "arrrgh," and gets more and more tragically smileless, old, lifeless, tough, depressing, and unrewarding.  

 Choosing, then, is not about taking the path towards quick or easy or safe or comfortable or convenient or guarantee.  Academia too often changes at a glacial pace, a tweak here, a hone there, and an adjustment somewhere.  It's what Clayton Christensen, in his INNOVATOR'S DILEMMA, would call "sustaining change."  Academia has become a culture that is averse to inconvenience, discomfort, challenge, risk, mistake, and anything that is perceived as a threat to the granting of tenure or promotion.   Satisfaction, fulfillment, significance, however, comes from, as Aristotle said, how you choose to deal with that mixture of the good and bad times, with the successes and failures, with the safe and dangerous, with the easy and challenging.  

Experiences stretch you when you let them have an impact.  If we choose to live, we have to choose to make mistakes, to walk the challenging road; we have to choose to develop a vast capacity for failure and pain rather than seeking guarantees to avoid them; we have to choose to be emotional and subjective; we have to choose to dream, imagine.  Subjectivity versus objectivity, emotion versus reason, spirituality versus rationality are all false dichotomies.  If you choose to live justly and respect each and every student, if you live lovingly and have compassion for each student, if you live humbling and focus on the students rather than on yourself, and help each student to learn to live the same way, to remake themselves into the noble and sacred being they are, you're engaged in them all.  Chances are, however, if you're not engaged in them all, you're not really engaged in any.  

So, two decades ago, at the ripe old age of 50, I started discovering that the best adventures occur when we  choose to venture into new, unmarked terrain.  I surprised myself and for reasons I'm not sure I understand to this very day, I suddenly--literally, suddenly--began choosing own my own life and not worrying about those others; I choose to walk a road, my own road, to becoming young.  In the autumn of 1991, as I unexpectedly felt fierce, hot tears streaming down my cheeks like lava flowing from an erupting caldera, I chose to make it the springtime for the rest of my life; at that moment, I chose, consciously chose, that as I got older, I would not become old.  That Fall, I chose and still choose to rise and not to let anything become old hat, routine, and stale.  That September of 1991, I chose, and still choose, to heed Dylan Thomas; I began to rage against my dim light, and chose no longer to go gentle into that good night.  Instead, I chose to learn to let my age burn and rave, to sing the sun, to blaze like meteors and be joyous, to replace curses with blessings.  I chose and still choose for my words to fork lightning, for no deed to be frail, to embrace the newness and richness of each moment.  No, I chose and still choose not to pass mildly by.  There will be no dying light, no grieving of what could have been, no surrender of my life inside this breast of Louis Schmier.  

Make it a good day

-Louis-


Louis Schmier                          http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org       
Department of History                        http://www.therandomthoughts.com
Valdosta State University 
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