A Matter of Scale

To exist is to participate in an endless cycle
of neither creation nor destruction,
but redistribution.
—Zuyva Sevilla

I form light and create darkness.
I make weal and create woe.
I the Lord do all these things.
—Isaiah 45:7

In the late 1970s, videographers Charles and Ray Eames filmed a short, 9-minute documentary exploring what it might be like to experience reality at a variety of different scales, from the subatomic to the cosmological. This now iconic (and apparently trademarked) video, the Powers of Ten™, would become the gold standard in many a science classroom for teaching about the concept of magnitude, and for the tiny fraction of my readers who were never exposed to it during their school years or whose memories recall it only vaguely, I recommend a brief pause here to take a short cognitive detour to watch it before continuing.

Because “scale” very much informs this posting’s essay.

It started with the article I mentioned last time about black holes and the accelerating rogue stars shooting across interstellar space at 400 times the speed of a bullet. Reading that, I couldn’t help but wonder at the enormous dimensions of time and distance this research was hinting at, and I also couldn’t help but think about how absolutely amazing it was that we have the time and resources to know such things and how absolutely utterly irrelevant this knowledge was, is, or ever shall be to the survival of any human that has, does, or will live.

Unless, of course, we’ve not been looking at quite the right quadrant in the night sky with our telescopes. Then, one of these hypersonic suns may very well plow into our solar system unbeknownst to us, instantly reducing every quark of matter from Mars to the Kuiper Belt into pure plasma.

But that’s sort of the whole point: everything we experience involves a degree of scale, and the character of that scale can change in less than the wink of an eye. Take the kind of privilege I wrote about in Unbidden Thoughts: while differences in economic status may impact how likely one is to engage in proactive civic action (i.e. I have the wealth to fight against Trump), widen the gap of that status enough and suddenly you have the storming of the Bastille—or in our case, potentially, the new, unfinished White House ballroom. Or—using my other example of privilege from that essay—increase the degree of illiteracy enough in this country and all the AI in the world can’t prevent the consequent financial collapse (go read economist Paul Krugman’s substack if you want the terrifying details).

The bottom line is that matters of scale are all around us, and it behooves us (I know; a very “me” verb) to identify them, pay attention to them, and—ultimately—choose how they will guide our actions. For example, at the scale of the Big Bang, the very process of evolution that led to an organism capable of understanding its own origin as a species is irrelevant and empty of all meaning: our mere 80-year organized structure of atoms does not last long enough in a 15-billion-year sequence to count as even a fleeting moment.

Heck, simply from the perspective of the Voyager probe’s famous “pale blue dot,” astronomer, Carl Sagan reminds us:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

However, simply because we are an organism who can possess such a breadth of awareness does not mean that we can actually live at such scales. At the very least, basic biological needs prohibit it—you have to eat, you have to sleep, and you have to excrete; all very immediate requirements of one’s attention. Yet, precisely because we can possess a sense of scale well beyond these things, humans have a bad habit of forgetting the dimensions at which we truly do operate, insisting on striving for what is ultimately unattainable and making ourselves miserable in the process: like anyone, I can have a modestly meaningful life, but nothing I nor anyone else ever does will last at the scale our minds are capable of envisioning.

Acceptance, though, of this fundamental truth about our finite nature needn’t result in the anguished cry of Shelley’s Ozymandias—something my adolescent charges regularly and consistently forget as they persist in their belief that every test, every grade, every performance must somehow have life-altering consequence. I can inform them all I want that when they are my age, they will not remember this academic moment at all, and that the brain science is clear that real learning only follows equally authentic failure. But they possess neither the fully wired pre-frontal cortex nor the sheer quantity of dunder-headed adult moments to truly comprehend—let alone embrace!—what I am saying to them. EVERYTHING means EVERYTHING to a teenager, and at best, I can hope that some of my offered adult outlook gets remembered at some future “Ah ha! THAT’s what he was talking about!” moment.

Yet this adolescent preoccupation with the “drama of it all” is, itself, a matter of scale. And a very age appropriate one, too. In fact, while I recall being as theatrical in my magnification of the state-of-affairs as the next teenager, the only two actual formal assessments (i.e. tests) I remember from my high school years are the Anatomy final at the end of my Junior year and the AP English exam at the end of my Senior one. What’s more, the reason I remember these specifically has nothing to do with the weight of their impact on my life but because both situations involved highly intense emotions. In the case of the Anatomy exam, my best friend at the time had convinced me to see the midnight opening of The Empire Stikes Back, where we picked up a couple of the girls standing in line, and so I didn’t start studying for a 7:30 a.m. exam until 3:30 that morning. Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the AP English exam, one of my fellow classmates marched over to me and snarled in a voice drowning in vitriol, “THAT had to be hard even for YOU!”

As for the material content of either test? Nada.

Thus, at age 62 and counting, I am left with a fun, playful memory from my youth along with a somewhat painful, searing one—both of which simply reside with all the other electronic files buzzing around my synapse from a lifetime of emotionally intense experiences. Again, a matter of scale: is the “I” my brain creates each moment simply the sum-total of my memories? Or are my memories simply a subset of what my brain uses to create “me?” Am I my fate or is my fate my doing? Or is it, perhaps, a little of both-and?

I ponder these things right now because in addition to reading about black holes and literal shooting stars I have also been reading some more Oliver Burkeman (whose work is dedicated to encouraging people to live at realistic scales and who has to have a playfully mischievous sense of irony that it will only take 4 weeks). And I have been doing all this reading while simultaneously living with the anxieties of the college admission’s process manifesting in most of my classes, a government shut-down (thankfully over for a while) that is leaving my neighbors threatened with starvation and no health care, and ICE agents terrorizing whole populations throughout the United States. Add in the most stunningly beautiful fall foliage seen here in the mid-Atlantic in my memory, one of the best set-building crews my former colleague and I have ever had for the fall Musical, and my gratitude for meaningful employment, a secure domicile, and financial security and…OMGg! So many different magnitudes of scale for the brain to cope with that I can practically feel the cortisol and dopamine sloshing around inside my skull in mutual antagonism!

But again, that’s the point. We all live at different scales all the time, and while the knowledge of genocides in Darfur, the Congo, and Gaza leave me simply depressed because there is little, directly, that I can do about them, I can ease my seniors’ distress about the next chapter of their lives; I can donate to my local foodbanks and organizations that fight injustice; and I can steward my gifts and my talents to impact my immediate world constructively. I can engage in hope.

Which leads me to one final thought related to exploring Burkeman’s efforts to do likewise. It was interesting to read his 28 essays (one for each day in a month) because while some of them brought fresh insights into how to handle the finitude of being human, others evoked moments of “been there; done that; already know it.” And that got me to thinking about one of the most important scales of all for the individual: aging. It turns out— I continue to learn—that some of life’s most significant understandings just come with growing older, and the extra twelve years I have on Burkeman are just enough for me to have found some of his ideas bemusing—in the same way I look at my current students and have to shake my head sometimes with a smile on my face, thinking “You’ll get it…eventually” while simultaneously feeling blessed to have seen so many former of them into adulthood to know that they do.

It is, after all, just a matter of scale.

References

Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Plait, P. (Sept. 2025) The Black Hole Next Door. Scientific American. Pp. 83-84.

Sagan, C. (1994) https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot.

Srikant, K. (Feb. 26, 2025) Fact Check: Is there a consensus that a majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? Econofact.https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-majority-of-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck.

Unbidden Thoughts

priv◦i◦lege (priv⸍’l) n.—a special right or immunity granted or available
only to a particular person or group; an unearned advantage

In my own highly imperfect way, I try each day to remind myself what my white, male, cisgender, heterosexual privilege “buys” me in our society—to recall how blessed I am to have my health, work that I love, and the economic stability to spend my evenings watching Netflix. However, recently, I have had a couple of experiences that have caused me to view both my own individual privilege as well as the general inequitable distribution of it in our society in a whole new way, and the insights this has provided about the current political situation in this country have been illuminating.

The first incident occurred while I was walking to breakfast one Saturday morning and I encountered two men having a heated discussion over money. I only caught about 30 seconds of it as I passed them on the sidewalk, but that was enough for me to know that the two men were acquainted enough for the one to loan the other money to cover some household expenses, that the loaner was in anxious need of being repaid to cover some of his own, and that neither of them were adequately employed to cover everything. Indeed, I recognized the shirt uniform of a local grocery store on the loaner, providing me with a very realistic idea of his likely weekly income. It was clear there was no danger of things escalating to physical violence, but it was also equally clear that the attentions of these men were wholly occupied with their financial dilemmas and nothing else.

That’s when the insight struck, unbidden: the economic realities of their lives pretty much precluded either of these men from having the time or energy—the luxury—of concerning themselves with the current political situation in this country. Daily survival was consuming all their attention, and as Maslow wisely observed, until you have met basic physiological and safety needs, there are absolutely no additional inner resources for anything else. Concerns about democratic norms and Trump’s authoritarian behaviors are meaningless white noise to someone apprehensively worried (if not panicked) about food, clothing, and shelter.

Now, I had never considered the notion that civic engagement might be a luxury—a privilege—but as I recalled an incident in my own early adult life where I made a very stupid financial decision that forced me to eat nothing but cooked white rice and unseasoned lentils for a month (and I wish I was joking or exaggerating), I realized that of course such engagement is a luxury! We can talk all we want about responsible citizenship, but as an individual, I or anyone else must have the additional resources beyond survival and safety before someone can literally afford to take on that responsibility. As an affluent white male, I can express my outrage at the Trump administration all I want and as loudly as I want because my economic status more than meets my basic needs. I have the privilege of being pissed off.

But that got me to wondering how many other people in our society find themselves in the same situation as the two men I encountered, and while the answer is, frankly, a “moving target”—some surveys have the percentage of households living paycheck-to-paycheck as high as 62%, some as low as 34%—the most conservative evaluations done by Jeffrey Fuhrer of the Brookings Institute identifies 43% of American households as unable to meet the benchmark of what he calls “the cost of a basket of basic necessities.” In other words, for nearly half the families in the United States, their total monthly incomes do not cover the cost of paying for the fundamental necessities to meet Maslow’s physiological and safety needs.

Which means that a disturbingly high number of people in this country simply do not have the necessary luxury to worry about the fate of their immediate communities, let alone the fate of the nation or something as abstract as “democracy.” Add in the fact that these individuals therefore also do not have the extra “bandwidth” to be sorting the disinformation and misinformation flooding their lives, and the state-of-affairs right now in our society suddenly makes a lot more sense to me than it did a couple of weeks ago: if you are truly a “have-not,” then the only “truth” that can matter is whatever enables you to be less “not.”

Granted, that may sound awfully cynical of me. But like I said, I remember my own beans-and-rice moment, and I know for a fact that I did not spend a lot of that month worried about the Iran-Contra Affair of the Reagan presidency.

Yet, what those in the MAGA movement might be more likely to accuse me of than cynicism is elitism, and that brings me to my other experiential insight of the recent past. Again, another breakfast. Only this time, the unbidden thought came as I was reading an article about black holes. Apparently, the gravitational well of the super black holes at the center of galaxies can slingshot actual stars through space at tremendous velocities, and in fact:

S5-HVS1 was the first confirmed such hypervelocity star, and it’s moving at more than 1,700 kilometers per second. Feel free to take a moment to absorb that fact: an entire star has been ejected from a black hole at more than six million kilometers per hour [four orders of magnitude faster than the 4,200 km/hr of the fastest bullet]. The energies involved are terrifying (Plait, p. 84).

I learned further that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting our own has its own super black hole and is consequently effectively “shooting stars at us!” Granted, the asteroids in our own solar system are far more problematic (ask the dinosaurs!), but still….

I know; I digress. Back to my unbidden thought. Or perhaps I should I say thoughts, plural. First, here I sat with the time and leisure to read something interesting that had no practical value to my physiological or safety needs. Second, I also had the benefit of a level of education that enabled me not only to comprehend this article but to have the consequent and correlating cognitive capacity to parse and analyze the very threats to democracy and our social order that the Trump administration now presents. In other words, I can be outraged at Trump’s actions because I can fully understand what the consequences of them are. Again, I possess the privilege—of a different kind—to be pissed off.

Now, education should neither be a “luxury” nor a “privilege”—especially in a democracy!—yet sadly, the historical record in this country reveals that education has seldom been an absolute right for everyone in the population. The closest we probably came was in the post-war years following WW2, with the GI bill and Brown vs. the Board of Education (along with some other curricular reforms such as “the new math”). But even those efforts often faced heavy resistance or were not equitably distributed, and by the end of the school busing conflicts of the 1970s and the rise of the Reagan era in the 1980s, an unbiased, just, and equivalent education for “all” began once more to be a “right” of only the more affluent.

Not that there weren’t significant efforts to change this trajectory. The “No Child Left Behind” and the “Every Student Succeeds Act” were national legislative efforts to improve America’s schools—as were the creation of the Common Core set of national educational standards for literacy and numeracy. But, too often, the assessment methods of these efforts ended up being either punitive in character (with poor urban and rural school districts frequently taken over by state boards of education) or publicly unpalatable (the Common Core demonstrating how badly devolved critical thinking skills had actually become in the U.S.). Thus, by the time of the pandemic, an equitable education for all in this country had been on a steady decline for over a decade, and even where it was happening (as Mehta & Fine demonstrated), the quality was at best mediocre.

And we all know what happened next.

Which brings me back to my unbidden thoughts of these past few weeks. First, they are obviously correlated. One’s level of education and one’s economic security go hand in hand, and so it should not be surprising to find so many people in our society dispossessed of the “privilege” of civic engagement—nor the rise in authoritarianism that comes with that. Second, my newfound awareness that civic engagement is in any way or to any degree a privileged luxury that not everyone in our society has full, unfettered access to frankly horrifies me—it is not a truth I am thrilled or excited to learn. But, third, now that I am aware of my additional privilege, it is incumbent on me to employ it as best as I am able to combat the negative changes I see today in our society, and I believe where I can do that best remains for now the classroom.

Moreover, the reason why I believe that this is true is because of the life and work of fellow educator, Paulo Freire. For those not familiar with him, Freire revolutionized the teaching of reading in his native Brazil, empowering once illiterate farmers and dayworkers in his country to confront the authoritarian power structures of their day, and so successful were Freire’s efforts that he was exiled by the 1964 military junta. However, the seed he planted remained, and a little over a decade later, he returned to his native land, where his literacy efforts would one day lead to some of Brazil’s first democratically elected governments. Today, the power of that educational legacy remains, and Brazil’s democracy has recently survived (and imprisoned) its own Donald Trump. Thus, never doubt what the power of the written word and the education it provides can do.

Nor, for that matter, the power of those who can—and still do—read. I keep writing my hope for a reason.

References

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.

Fuhrer, J. (June 20, 2024) How Many are in Need in the US? The Poverty Rate is the Tip of the Iceberg. The Brookings Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-many-are-in-need-in-the-us-the-poverty-rate-is-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/.

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Plait, P. (Sept. 2025) The Black Hole Next Door. Scientific American. Pp. 83-84.

Srikant, K. (Feb. 26, 2025) Fact Check: Is there a consensus that a majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? Econofact. https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-majority-of-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck.

Lemonade

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful
committed individuals can change the world.
In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.
—Margaret Mead

A genius is a man who takes the lemons Fate hands him
and starts a lemonade-stand with them.
—Elbert Hubbard

Quite recently, my father and I found ourselves unexpectedly stranded on our sailboat in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay with a dead diesel engine. The nearest port-of-call, Solomon’s Island, was at least six nautical miles away, and what little wind there was was coming from the wrong direction. Additionally, the final moments before we frantically shut the engine down were full of screaming warning lights and alarms, and so the future of the engine itself was weighing on our minds on top of the immediate dilemma in which we found ourselves. We could be looking at a catastrophic end to our time with this boat.

I share all of this because while we waited for the tow to arrive (unsolicited shout-out to BoatUS!!), we could have sat baking our brains out, bobbing for hours in the mid-day sun. Anyone familiar with the Chesapeake in mid-July knows how uncomfortably hot and humid it normally is at this time of year. Yet, for only the second time this summer, a strong cold-front had passed over our heads just a little over an hour before the breakdown (we had watched the cloud line move across us), and thus, instead of 95+ degrees in the shade, a humidity of 80, and a tropical dewpoint in the mid-70s, we found ourselves anchored amidst one of those rare, glorious summer days we occasionally have here in the mid-Atlantic with crystal blue skies, a temperature in the low 80s, humidity in the 50s, and a fall-like dewpoint in the low-60s.

All I could think was: lemonade. If we had to endure a crisis, at least a stunningly beautiful day made things a little less sufferable.

Bringing me to this essay’s central theme: what to do with the mounting number of “lemons” we have right now—especially for those of us in education? There is, of course, Trump’s Supreme Court sanctioned dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education and the loss of all the research that has made such positive impact on America’s schools—especially in the science of reading, one of life’s most critical skills. Add the loss of food subsidies (SNAP benefits) from the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” and we will have hungrier children in our classrooms for which the data of that negative impact on learning is well established. Then there is the recently revealed research from MIT that my arguments in my last essay now have actual EEG data recorded from brains showing AI’s negative impact on brain engagement, with users of ChatGPT consistently underperforming “at all neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” compared to the control groups. Toss in all the unvaccinated children that will be entering our schools this fall, and you have a regular petri dish for infectious disease impacting everyone’s learning as well.

What’s more, this list of “lemons” when it comes to education (let alone our larger society) doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I’ve felt compelled to write about in the past two years.

However, as I begin to prepare to enter year 37 of my teaching career, I was recently reminded of the power of the few to effect positive change when I joined my mother working for a day for a food mission program where she is a volunteer. She has mentioned this work now for quite a few years during our regular zoom conversations, and my impression has always been of this substantial group of people preparing and distributing numerous meals to people in need in the north St. Louis neighborhood where this program takes place. Yet when I arrived to help out at the end of this past month, I found that my mother was one of only four people cooking and packing up 200 meals that particular day, and as I added my assistance over the next few hours, I couldn’t help but marvel at what this tiny, dedicated crew was seeking to accomplish each week.

Now I am not naïve. The efforts of my mother and her three other volunteers are not going to solve the food shortage crisis facing the citizens who live in north St. Louis. They are not addressing the larger systemic problem, and I am confident that they are fully cognizant of this fact. But for at least a day, 200 of their fellow human beings went to bed, hunger satiated, able to sleep more deeply, and while individually, such acts may appear fruitless, collectively, they add up to remind us all of the power of compassion, kindness, and generosity to make “lemonade” out of life’s inevitable “lemons”—”lemons” which are handed to everyone, everywhere, in all walks of life.

Which brings me to my other recent reminder of the power of the few. During my visit with my mother where I helped in the program where she volunteers, I was also finishing up reading (yes, reading; always reading!) a book by Harvard researchers Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine about how we might generate deeper learning in our schools in this country. It is a study I will be writing much more about in a future posting, but the chapter most relevant to this current discussion is about the authentically engaged teachers they did find in some of the schools where they visited. Consistently (and dishearteningly), these teachers were the exceptions in their schools. Yet every school had them, and while they were not going to fix the systemic problems preventing deeper learning from happening for all the students in their respective schools, they were making a positive difference in the lives of those with the good fortune to inhabit their individual classrooms. Hence, at least some children were getting their intellectual hunger satiated.

Reminding me of one of education’s most famous cliched fables, the starfish story—an anecdote my very first principal told the assembled faculty at the start of my very first day as a professional. For the tiny minority reading this who do not already know it, the quick recap goes as follows: a great storm has tossed thousands of starfish up onto a beach where they lie suffocating; an old man walking the beach sees a young man strolling along, picking up one starfish at a time and tossing them back into the sea; the old man chastises the younger for engaging in such a Sisyphean task; to which the young man picks up the next starfish, tosses it into the sea and replies “it matters to that one.”

Everywhere this fall, there will be teachers engaged in the deeper teaching that leads to deeper learning. They may not be the majority. But they will be there. Tossing one “starfish” at a time back into the “sea.” I will be trying to join them as I have every year for nearly four decades.

Lemonade anyone?

References

Aurino, E., et al. (2020) Food for Thought? Experimental Evidence on the Learning Impacts of a Large-scale School Feeding Program. Journal of Human Resources (11:1123).

Chow, A. (June 23, 2025) ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study. TIME. https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school.

Mandavilli, A., Rosenbluth, T., Paris, F. (July 31, 2025) Childhood Vaccination Rates Have Dropped Again, C.D.C. Data Shows. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/health/child-vaccinations-decline-cdc.html.

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

A Letter to the Class of 2025

I was raised, if your heart’s beating, you play.
—Gary Woodland

Dear Members of the Class of 2025,

Several years ago, when I first started my project to help improve education in this country, I wrote a letter to my graduating seniors in the midst of the worst of the pandemic’s lockdowns and posted it for them to read from the isolation of their homes. I spoke a lot about the generative power of truth and the corrosive power of lies, challenging them to build a better world than the one they were inheriting, reminding them that “hope” is a verb, and today, variations on those themes have now featured prominently in every letter I have written to each graduating class ever since. This one will not be an exception.

Part of the reason for that, of course, is because moments of closure in our lives, milestones that mark the end of one journey and the start of another…they just naturally lend themselves to recalling the needs and demands, the ideals that inform every journey. It’s why all commencement addresses fundamentally sound the same: use your potential wisely; pack appropriately for the trip; stop and reflect from time to time; remember to love and be loved; and…here are three life lessons to aid you on your way!

Put simply, these moments of closure remind those of us older than you of similar times in our own lives, and because we care, we just want to provision you with some final wisdom for the road—to prepare you for the occassions of darkness we know inevitably await you. I know. Pretty heavy stuff for such a celebratory occasion. But like my letter to the class of 2020, I find myself writing once more during a time of tremendous turmoil, with a petulant child trying to tear it all down because he never learned how to work and play well with others, and thus, I find myself needing to be a little more overt about those “three life lessons.”

One of which is (and extremely appropriate to our current situation): avoid “magical thinking.” This is the term anthropologists use to refer to ritualistic behaviors done with the intent of somehow modifying something over which one has no actual control (e.g. if we sacrifice this goat, the rumbling volcano will not erupt). But, in today’s broader parlance, it can also refer to thoughts or deeds that simply ignore this lack of control. They can be as harmless as the superstitions behind game-day rituals before a sporting event or as devastating as the delusion that tariffs will cause corporations to abandon their investments to rebuild in the United States. However, the consequence of any magical thinking is always the same: engaging in actions that cannot have any actual bearing on reality.

Not that the actions themselves do not have consequences. The goat is dead; the “lucky” jersey must be washed; markets tumble. But the intent behind the actions remains no less disconnected from their ultimate impact, and it is this intent that can be truly hazardous.

Which leads me to perhaps the most dangerous magical thinking of all (and “life lesson” dos!): the notion of “the Perfect Life.” This is the misbelief that “if I just go to the right school…if I just marry the right person…if I just find the right career…if, if, if…if I just do the right things, then my life will be exactly the way I want it to be.” It is the fantasy that you can achieve a life completely free of frustration, boredom, discomfort, and disappointment, and quite cynically, it is a fantasy that quite a few people make a LOT of money off of—especially today’s social media influencers who try to convince you that if you just follow their lead, buy their product, do as they do, etc. that all will suddenly become bliss. Indeed, an entire medical field exists because of the magical thinking behind the notion of a Perfect Life, earning its practitioners $11.8 billion dollars in 2022 alone—and that’s not including the cosmetic industry itself. All of them, people and companies alike, with the expressed intent of making you feel inadequate about yourself so that they can sell you something.

However, there is no such thing as the Perfect life, never has been and never will be. Moreover, while all of us will engage in the occasional wishful thinking to cope emotionally with life’s finitude—the “if only I can get through this week, then everything will be okay” moments—it is when this wishful thinking turns into magical thinking that we run into trouble. When “if only I…” becomes the sole, primary motivating force in your life, then you condemn yourself to a Sisyphean existence of dismay and defeat. And that’s because there will always be a next “if only I…”—some obstacle to your “final” success, some obstruction to your “ultimate” happiness—and in the meantime, you just wasted who knows how much of your finite time on this planet feeling disappointed, disillusioned, and dyspeptic.

Therefore, do not wait until you are a middle-aged, career-obsessed individual with ulcers to learn not to engage in the magical thinking of the Perfect Life. And along the way, try to avoid Perfect Life’s cousins: “You Can Have It All” and “You Can Be Anything You Want to Be.” No. You cannot. Period. I want each of you to know (as I have written before) that you will have numerous opportunities to do a wide variety of things in this world and that, as an educator, I hope I have helped you begin to decide which of those choices you might finally find yourself investing in one day. But you are a finite organism on a finite planet with a finite lifespan (read The Price of “Pie” if you want to see just how finite), and thus, you will have no choice but to make lasting decisions about how to spend your finitude (remembering that failure to choose is itself a choice). You cannot have it all; you cannot do it all. And you cannot even do everything you wish for; hence, I encourage you to make decisions along your journey that are as thoughtful and informed as they can be (knowing that you will never have all the data) and then invest yourself as best you can, remembering that life is not a “to do” list.

Which brings me to that mandated third “life lesson” required of all commencement moments everywhere: you always have a choice; you just have to be willing to pay the cost. Want to become a neurosurgeon? Then you will give up nearly two decades of training time that won’t be available for family and friends. Want to have children? Then you accept the dozens of years’ worth of financial and emotional burdens required to raise them to adulthood (and often beyond). Want a life partner? Then you need to embrace all the daily compromises that that will demand to make it happen. The simple reality is that free will does not mean freedom from consequences; it simply means that part of any decision is determining whether it is worth the price or not. It can be as simple as choosing to do A rather than B on a weekend afternoon, knowing that B will not get done. Or, it can be as dramatic as quitting a job in protest, knowing that financial insecurity just became your new reality. Regardless, as renowned psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp once put it, “you are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.”

That last line, though, has to be one of the scariest ideas ever because if we join it together with the imperfect nature of our finite lives, we can find ourselves frightened that we are somehow not making the “right kind” of choices—the kinds of choices that are somehow worthy of their consequences. Then we risk trapping ourselves in a vicious cycle of indecision where we put absolute value on each choice as if the very worth of our lives was on the line every time. We risk becoming immobilized in the quest for so-called “best” decisions, and then life really does become “what happens while you’re busy making other plans”—in this case, about your future “best” possible choices.

Of course, this notion of ideal choices is simply another variant of the Perfect Life form of magical thinking, and yet what makes it particularly challenging to avoid is the reality that every choice does actually have a consequence. However, there are consequences and there are CONSEQUENCES, and unless you wish to waste a great deal of that finite life of yours “making plans” instead of living at least a modestly meaningful existence, then learning how to tell the difference is crucial. Because one of the great fallacies (and failures) of our culture is the fact that so many of us seem to believe that we must somehow justify the simple fact that we are alive. Too often, the message we hear is that we have “failed our potential” if we have not fundamentally transformed the world in one fashion or another. Well, reality check: you did not choose to be born; you simply are. In addition, the gut-punch truth is that everyone’s final destination is the same; so the time that you are here is a gift you didn’t—and in fact couldn’t—earn and one that has no claim on you whatsoever.

Which doesn’t mean, as the golfer Gary Woodland suggests, that you don’t play. Yes, from a certain perspective, your entire existence consists only of the consumption of oxygen, the production of carbon dioxide, and the transformation of various organic compounds; you are essentially nothing more than a chemical machine that runs, on average, for 80 years before breaking down and getting recycled into yet another chemical machine. However, from the more nuanced perspective acknowledging both human cognition and agency, you also have the power to have a significant impact on the qualitative experience of all that chemical machinery—both your own and what surrounds you—and you have that power for the better or for the worse. You can, to paraphrase Milton, “make of life a heaven or a hell,” and therefore how you use your finite time does matter; it just doesn’t need to have cosmic importance.

Not that you cannot (nor should not) aspire to have a lasting impact. The New York Times columnist, David Brooks, is correct when he writes that “every society on earth has a leadership class of one sort or another [who need] sensible views about authority so that they don’t childishly rule imperiously from above—[individuals who] embrace the obligations that fall on them as leaders, to serve the country and not their own kind.” Moreover, he is equally correct that if we want a society where everybody flourishes, we are going to need such leadership on steroids to establish better future institutions of governance (assuming we manage to survive the current imbecilic sociopath residing in the White House). Because only when we have leaders who listen to all their fellow citizens, anticipate everyone’s needs, and guide the social change to meet them will we finally find ourselves living in a truly just and equitable society. Maybe some of you are up to the challenge.

I know, that’s a big ask. Right up there with fixing climate change and all the other damage that my fellow elders and I are leaving you to try to repair. What’s more, anyone who has ever constructed anything—a Lego model, a theater set, a curriculum, even a meal—knows firsthand how much harder it is to build than to tear down. But that’s why—again!—it is SO important not to engage in magical thinking. When there is so much that needs fixing (and some of the repairs are truly global!), you can easily find yourself at times feeling cognitively overwhelmed and fatigued to the point of paralysis. This is especially true in today’s 24/7 digital—for which modern psychology even has a term. It’s called “compassion fatigue,” and it can make taking any sort of action seem pointless.

However, as author and journalist, Oliver Burkeman, points out, the solution to compassion fatigue is both ridiculously simple and yet incredibly challenging (for fear of the judgement of others): embrace your finitude and pick your battles; choose which change you will seek to be and let the rest go, trusting that others will choose different battles than yours. Indeed, one could argue that “in [our] age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight” (p. 36) and then giving those battles what you can.

And before you think giving what you can cannot possibly be enough to have an actual impact, I will share a small piece of my own journey. Most reading this will know that I commute to work by walking and have done so now for nearly 30 years. Well, there is an exercise I have one of my senior classes do where they calculate the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air from burning fossil fuels, and on a whim, I did the calculations with them a little over a year ago on how much CO₂ my decision to walk rather than drive has kept out of the atmosphere. Turns out the answer is a little over 30 metric tons, which is the equivalent of 9 football fields worth of forest. Or to make that a visual many people reading this can understand, it is the equivalent of growing or preserving a forest occupying the entire campus of Friends School of Baltimore. Thus, never doubt your individual power to effect positive change. Even the smallest of decisions, enacted consistently can have profound impacts.

But that brings me to a point I try to make each year, and that is to be graceful with one another. Each of you will make mistakes along your journey, mistakes that will impact others, including people you love. You will bruise and be bruised because sin is real. Yet, you have the power for compassion—to forgive yourself as well as others—and with it, you therefore have the power to restore wholeness in a broken world—the employment of which is the ultimate form of hope.

So let me leave you here with a small bit of wisdom I have passed on before, an idea in Zen Buddhism known as “Mu.” “Mu” is the understanding that sometimes when we find ourselves with an intractable problem, that perhaps we are not asking the right question(s). Thus, a Zen master will regularly tell a struggling disciple, “Mu”—you need a different perspective. Therefore, I share this concept of “Mu” with you because as you make your finite choices about your finite life, deciding which consequences to pay and which limited battles to fight, you will regularly find yourself very humanly second-guessing yourself. And in those moments, my permanent advice to you will always be, “Mu.”

Congratulations and best of luck!

References

Brooks, D. (Feb. 27, 2025) We Can Achieve Great Things. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/opinion/government-great-progressive-abundance.html.

Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Milton, J. (1667) Paradise Lost (available in multiple formats)

A Letter to the Class of 2024

We are not educated for darkness.
—Constance Fitzgerald

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
—Diane Ackerman

Winners play hurt.
—Vince Lombardi

Dear Members of the Class of 2024,

When essayist and author, Robert Fulghum, was once asked why all his books were so similar, he replied that he returned again and again to just a few common themes because only these were central to his thinking. Hence, he went on to say:

If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely resemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it is not a matter of sloppy editing. I’m repeating myself. I’m reshuffling words in the hope that just once I might say something exactly right. And I’m wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily resolved or easily dismissed. I run at them again and again because I’m not finished with them. And may never be. Work-in-progress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about. And some progress in the work is enough to keep it going on (p. 30).

I share these words because I find myself once again authoring this annual letter to all of you, knowing that I still do not yet have it quite right. And while there are only so many ways for those of us who have loved and cared for you to send you on to the next chapter in your narrative—and usually clichéd ways at that!—I, like Fulghum, feel compelled to try.

So here goes: one final set of lessons from the heart for the soul.

To begin with, like Fulghum, I too have found certain common themes arising regularly as I have written this epistle each year, and an especially big, “elephant-in-the-living-room” one is the fact that the world your elders and I are leaving you is one hot mess—both literally and figuratively. I do not need to itemize the details of the disasters; you get enough of that from your daily feeds. However, it can be quite challenging not to give in to despair in the face of such dysfunction, and “too often we either submit and surrender our souls to the social consensus [that originates it], or withdraw in passive narcissism” (Radical, p. 34). Worse, “the temptation in hard times is to become the inferno” and burn it all down in one great Götterdämmerung (Garden, p. 21; my emphasis). Hence, in a world where—as Billy Joel once wrote—“we didn’t start the fire,” how do you find the resilience and inner resources to become an effective agent for positive change?

It starts by attending to, deeply listening to, and embracing the Stranger (what in neuroscience terms is the prefrontal cortex encountering the totally new). Only interaction with the unfamiliar can challenge us to grow and to change, and more importantly, only interaction with the Stranger enables us to realize that “other people are not required to perform roles in one’s internal play, no matter how wise, good, or reasonable the script may seem” (Garden, p. 18). When you gain this perspective, you realize that each of us is caught up in our own narrative and can only revise that narrative when we allow another’s narrative to enter into our own. When that happens, suddenly the “jerk” cutting you off at the traffic light could be the parent frantically heading to the hospital with a seriously injured child, or the distant and seemingly dismissive waiter could be struggling to manage chronic pain that is in no way their fault.

Is the “jerk” at the light probably still actually a jerk? Of course. But once you’ve embraced the Stranger—and there will be lots of opportunities as you leave the familiar for the unknown in the coming years—you can no longer judge another with the righteous certainty you once did. You have a more expansive, compassionate narrative guiding your life, making you a more effective agent in this world. What’s more, since this is a graduation moment and clichés are mandatory, the cliché for this lesson is: learn to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes; it will make you a better walker.

Granted, all this learning can be discomfiting—especially in the alien and uncharted waters where you are all next headed. As Mary Rose O’Reilley puts it, “to be stretched almost beyond where you can go is acutely painful. One often fails and failure brings pain. One must court doubt and despair in the process of learning anything at all” because as a neuroscientist might put it, “if your brain isn’t uncomfortable, you aren’t learning anything” (Garden, p. xii). Or to put it another way, if you are not heavily invested in the change you wish to see, there will be no change—in you, in others, or in the world. Hence, in a very real way, to learn is to love enough to let whatever you are loving fundamentally alter your narrative, alter who you are.

Ah! But any act of love—even the smallest—leaves us vulnerable to being wounded, opening up the possibility for darkness in our lives, and that brings me to a second theme I have found myself returning to again and again over the years: the reality of Constance Fitzgerald’s words at the start of this letter. Too often, we do not teach about the character of darkness, that is has a purpose and a value in our lives. Instead, we tend to revile it or try to pretend it’s not there because confronting it can be so difficult. Yet, the simple truth is that “darkness interrogates us at the places where our knowledge of reality is most deficient, our illusions most entrenched” (Garden, pp. 70-71). It is what “comes along to tell us we’re worshipping an inadequate object…to loosen us from the bondage of a devotion we’ve offered to an unworthy object, a false god” (Garden, p. 21). Thus, it is only through our encounters with moments of darkness that we truly stretch who we are as a person, truly grow, and I can share from firsthand experience that it is the only path to wisdom.

However, occassionally a time of darkness will take on a life of its own, and that is when you must discover the power of wintering. We all do it at some point in our lives, and no matter how it arrives, it is usually unexpected, isolating, and emotionally raw. Yet, as author Katherine May puts it so eloquently:

It’s also inevitable. We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun, an endless unvarying high season. But life’s not like that…Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we are able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime, we still couldn’t avoid the winter. Our parents would age and die; our friends would undertake minor acts of betrayal; the machinations of the world would eventually weigh against us. Somewhere along the line…[winter will come] (p. 11).

And when it does, you must remember that it is actually the crucible for life, not its ending. There can be no spring without the rejuvenating and healing power of winter, and “since [its] pain will come to us anyway, why not figure out how to deal with it. It’s hard to grasp the connection between suffering and spiritual growth if we think of [living] only as a way to gain peace and tranquility” (Garden, pp. 74-75). The proverbial bottom line is that you have to engage the world as you are at any given moment, and sometimes that means you will “play hurt.” It is not one of the “fun” lessons of adulthood, but it is one of its more vital ones.

What’s more, as you “play”—both hurt and healthy—I hope you will begin to learn the lesson which all of you, my students, have taught me over these many years. Experiencing both aching and healing, alienation and grace, sin and salvation throughout the coming years, you may start to notice the paradox that you actually need all of these to become fully human and that it is only out of that full humanity that you can affect the change you wish to see in the world. The yin and yang of life is like breathing, and it is what you do with the life which this breathing makes possible that matters. Therefore, learn to breathe well and then choose what to do with the life that results in a thoughtful and self-reflective manner.

And, yes, while modern neuroscience may have demonstrated that the agency to do this choosing may simply be a cognitive illusion generated by the brain, that doesn’t mean that the character of the illusion isn’t important. As Mary Rose O’Reilley argues, “it matters what metaphors we use to describe ourselves to ourselves” (pp. 26-27), and as Norman Vincent Peale once wrote, “change your thoughts and you change your world.” Hence, as you now journey forth, I pray for each of you that you choose your individual metaphors and thoughts well. They will define you (however illusory that may be) and, consequently, they will define your impact on this world.

Finally, always remember that “somewhere there is a great mystery that wants to come live in your house and change everything” (Radical, p. 48). Be open to it when it arrives; welcome it. It will have much to teach you; you will have much to learn. Reject it at your peril (spoken from hard-won experience) and always remember that the obvious and predictable are not always the safest road to travel: you can get just as disoriented and lost in the familiar as you can in the unknown. Therefore, consider the road less traveled as you let your next great mystery into your life, and remember that Frost was right when it wrote all those years ago about how it can make all the difference.

Congratulations, then, and may the coming celebrations be joyous ones!

References

Fulghum, R. (1991) Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Side of the Refrigerator Door. New York: Villard Books.

May, K. (2020) Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. New York: Riverhead Books.

O’Reilley, M. R. (2005) The Garden at Night: Burnout & Breakdown in the Teaching Life. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

O’Reilley, M. R. (1998) Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.