Boy, do I realize what it means to be healthy. Three weeks ago, I was diagnosed with pneumonia. It’s one of the plagues that are ravaging both the town and campus. My doctor/friend put me under literal house arrest for two weeks. Susan lovingly, but sternly, strapped on an ankle bracelet. You don’t mess with the mama!! Boy, she proved to have been a Marine drill sergeant in another lifetime. I quickly changed my classes into something resembling computerized distance learning so as to minimize any disruption for the students. But, the heavy antibiotics and codeine laced cough syrup made it difficult to focus. Last week and this, I am allowed only to attend my morning class and afternoon class. Otherwise, it’s being house-bound for me. Still no exercise. I had to cancel a keynote address at the Georgia Conference on College Teaching that I was looking forward to attending. Now, I’m being a “good boy” so I can gather my strength for next week’s Lily-South conference.

      So, I am reminded that being healthy means doing what my body and soul were designed to do: be on the go. Our heart tells us that it was designed to pump blood through our arteries and veins to nourish and flush out our insides. Our lungs were design to deeply breath and refresh us. We weren’t really designed to sit inside, but to get out and go. The same is true of our spirit, for it, too, was designed to be on the go. It, too, was made to be exercised, to be pushed, to sweat, to grow, to develop, and to change. Neither body nor soul, neither heart nor brain nor spirit was made to for a status quo.

     You know it is too easy to get tenure, to get to 68 years old, to get to almost 43 years as an academic, to get near retirement, and say, “I’ve had it. I’m gonna rest on my laurels. I’m not getting involved. I’m not sticking my neck out. I’ll get out of the water. I’ll just do ‘my own thing.’ I’ll play it cool and ‘hide.'” God, it’s so easy not to plunge into life’s deep, exciting days and only wade in the safe shallows. It’s so easy to get a “stuck where you are” existence. The problem is that it’s an avoidance. It’s an imprisonment. It turns a world of boundless energy, excitement, wonder into a big, overwhelming, scary place. It’s a detour on the road to imagination, freedom, creativity, into a dark forest of stagnating, rut-bound, flabby routine. All this is why I fear the word “achieved” and “success.” You can into trouble if you think you know how, you’ve arrived, that you’ve got it, and that you don’t have to change. It’s a recipe for losing your know-how, for getting lost, and for losing it; it’s a concoction for getting bored and boring; it’s a nasty mixture for paralysis; it’s a foul-tasting blend of closed-minded self-righteousness, isolating arrogance, blinding infallibility, and immobilizing inflexibility.

     You know when I was a child, I wondered what I was going to be when I grow up. I think part of my epiphany eighteen years ago was the realization that I should never “grow up,” that I shouldn’t want to grow up, that I should keep on growing and wondering what I was capable of becoming and going to be. My body may be on the twilight side of the hill, but my spirit is still on the morning side. What keeps me young is that my stone is always rolling; I don’t let moss gather on it; nor do I let grass grow under my feet. You see, to be emphatic, if you don’t sharpen the saw, you don’t keep the knife’s edge honed, if you don’t engage in that whetstone of constant self-renewal, if you don’t keep on the go, you’ll not grow, nothing will really happen, you’ll lose your sharpness, you’ll grow stale, and you’ll atrophy into dullness. Sure, there’s no newness without change, and change is always challenging, uncomfortable, and maybe painful. But, to stay healthy physically and spiritually, I guess I’ll just have to keep on experiencing growing pains. After all, growing pains aren’t merely something preteens experience. They only occur when people are growing; they only stop when people stop growing

     What got me thinking about this wasn’t just being in prison lock-up, “on the stop” for two weeks, and “on the slow” for at least two more. It was a book I just finished reading. It’s a book by the former president of Coca-Cola, Don Keough. The title of this masterful, neat, quick read book is “The Ten Commandments For Business Failure.” It’s really about being healthy in the workplace, be it industry or academia. One statement of by Keough sums it all up. “You will fail if you quit taking risks, are inflexible, isolated, assume infallibility, play the game close to the line, don’t take time to think, put all your faith in outside experts, love your bureaucracy, send mixed messages, and fear the future.”

Lots to think about.

Louis