Back to this student, whom I’ll call Jane, who got me to thinking about “suffering,” “experience” and “reflection.”  Jane said something profound without really knowing it until I told her.  She said, “When I felt you noticed me, you dared me.  You dared me to notice myself and not just accept who I thought I was.  You dared me to ask the questions ‘who does he see,’ ‘who should I see,’ and ‘who am I?  I still do to this day almost everyday to be what you called a ‘human becoming.’  And, dammit your words from Yoda echo within me so deep I can’t get rid of them.  I don’t want to.  It helps me to deal with whatever comes my way.”

She was talking of two quotes of Yoda to Luke that I wrote for brief five minute discussion on the whiteboard as “Words For The Day”:  “Do or Do not.  There is no try.”  “Luke:  ‘I can’t believe it.’ Yoda:  ‘That is why you fail.'”

Acceptance.  Notice.  Question.  This trilogy, in a very intense way, is both the problem of and answer to transformation.  Let’s take acceptance.  Acceptance is a barricade.  It is a kind of sleepwalking zombie-ness. It’s being complacent about yourself.  It’s a conforming acquiescence.  It is a kind of resistance, a sort of fear, an unwillingness to open oneself up to a reality other than the one you have become accustomed.  Sure, acceptance is friendly, feels comfortable, is comforting, is known, is safe and secure.  But, it is also blinding and unthinking and numbing.

Now notice.  Notice stirs the waters.  It throws light on the dark corner.  It is a dare no longer to be apathetic to yourself by being seen and by seeing.  It is a dare to no longer go unnoticed.  It is the dare to see your own beauty, your own sacredness, your own nobility, your own uniqueness.  It is a dare to sense the possibility of change, of learning how to ask the same question to both yourself and others:  “who does he see?”  “who are you?”

And, now the question.  Question, particularly “who are you pilgrim,” is a form of awakening from a sleep.  It initiates the naming of your halting fear.  It is the road to belief, faith, hope, and love.  It’s that question, or any question, that shatters stagnation and gets things moving.  It’s the question that raises desire.  It’s the question that is the sound to challenge the silence of acceptance.  It’s the question that shatters security created by acceptance.  It’s the question that creates alertness, awareness, attentiveness.  It’s the question that  throws down the mindful gauntlet to mindlessness.  It’s the question that creates uniqueness.  It’s the question that challenges an acquiescent consensus of acceptance.  It’s the question that arouses a life deadened by acceptance. It’s essence is seeing, thinking, and sharpening.

Without the question, that rising of desire, that self-awareness of how things might become, nothing changes, barriers aren’t broken, and nothing transforms.  As Jane discovered, it converts a static “human being” into a pilgriming “human becoming.”  It unties the halting “not” in your “cannot,” and kicks you in your dynamic “can.”  Those reflective questions Jane is constantly asking, as we all should, are a dawning of self-knowledge, self-development, self-arousal, self-inspiration and self-awareness that breaks through the night of acceptance.  It carries her into new worlds and thereby expands her world.

That is what an education should be all about.

Louis