It’s about 7:00. Slowly, the night’s blackness is starting to be pushed away by the approaching gray of dawn.   I’ll go out for my 7 mile walk in a few minutes when the sun is fully above the horizon and I can see where I’m going.  This dawning morning, sipping another cup of freshly brewed coffee by the computer, I had come in from standing by the koi pond.  I was listening to the music of the pond’s waterfall.  I could hear the warbling of an awakening bird above me.

I am always amazed by this time of the impending day.  Miraculous things occur everyday that most of us don’t sleep through or take for granted:  dawn, with its awakening sights and sounds.  It always causes me to pause.   A parade of gray, dancing colors, sounds, bright sun rays reveals a  newness in the air:  mysterious, unknown,  hopeful, instructive, beautiful, joyful.   You can feel the freshness and smell the wonder.  You can sense that everything has led up to being here this day.  Here is life, my life.  Here is when the past, my past, can change.  Here is when the future, my future, begins.  Here are new choices to choose.  Here I can exhale regret and dismay, and inhale new life into myself.   All this revolves around, involves, unconditional faith and hope and love that is tough, demanding, raw, gritty, active, involved, engaged, adventurous and very real; they are respecting, embracing, expansive, inclusive, connecting, generous, tender, kindly, caring, sympathetic, energetic, edifying.  They are the day’s starter kit.  In them, you find the love of living, loving and living big.  They are what make common things unique and sacred for me.  For me, they instill a fearless and supple hunger and thirst for what is and what may be.  They defeat defeat.  They reduce reducing.  They activate action.  They inspire inspiration.  They energize energy.  They are a celestial rhythm that makes possible the only thing we have:  today, now, with its challenges, opportunities, and possibilities.   So, if I have a mission, it is to see my own daily dawn, and assist others in doing likewise.  And, therein lies a seminal questions:  do we see the dawn in the likes of John?  Do we break the confines of our accustomed perceptions and expectations of the likes of him?  Do we hear the secrets of the birds’ song in the likes of him?  Do we see the bright rays of faith and hope and love pushing back the darkness of stereotype, generality, and label to reveal the beauty in each student?

That outlook was what I drew on when I responded to a question from a professor, “What did you say to John and do with him to get him to change?”

This was my answer.   “Your question got me to thinking about Carl Rogers’ On Becoming A Person.  In 1991, that 1961 groundbreaking book became a keystone in my life and my humanistic view of teaching, and my realization that we academics are in the people business, in the serving business, in the business of serving people.   In it he wrote that given the right conditions people can identify for themselves what hurts them and find their own way to personal growth.  So, my quick answer to the question is ’Nothing and everything.’  I did nothing:  no ‘curing,’ no ‘saving,’ no’fixing,’ no advice, no answers, not even motivating.  I never do any of that.  All I did with him as I have done with others was, with a strong emotional sense of  what I call ‘serving otherness.’ to be deeply present:  accepting, seeing, noticing, appreciating, attentive of, attentive to, aware of, alert to, sensitive of, listening to, believing, respecting, and, above all, connecting with the superglue of unconditional and nonjudgmental faith, hope, and love.   It’s piecing through, or tearing down, impersonal and dehumanizing herdlike stereotypes, generalities, and labels.  It’s living out the lyrics Mr. Rogers’ ‘It’s You I Like.’   It’s a kind of companionship presence that pushes aside “aloneness,”  that invites someone with her or his potential to show up:  no knee jerk assumptions, no intrusive questions, no ‘how are you,’ no forced conversation, no doing all the talking, no expectations of visible and immediate results.  It’s the only way John and others will come to terms with themselves, with who they are and who they truly can be.  It’s a quiet hands-off and a loud hearts-on involved approach that is not about me being seen.  It’s about them being seen, respected, and appreciated.  It’s about serving the needs of others in a way they can serve themselves with a patient ‘whenever you’re ready,’ and ‘whenever you can.’  When John first entered class he felt alone.  All I did was to offer him the bones of acceptance, of belonging, and of fitting in, and let him do the rest if he was so inclined to seize the opportunity.”

“After being slapped on the back with congratulations by his classmates, after getting a nod and a wink and a thumbs up from me, his daily journal entries became something of a spiritual vomit, expunging all the toxins that were poisoning his soul.   Each day, knowing I was reading his every word, he was acquiring a confidence he never had to search out the once unimaginable “I can do this” potential within himself.   Each day, he found that he had been driven by outside forces rather than those from within him.  Each day, he slowly discovered that he should not have been so certain of who he is, who he could be, and what he could do or not do.  Each day, he slowly understood that whatever limits he had accepted, he had placed on himself.

‘You know, Chicago’s John Cacioppo, a psychologist at Chicago, in his Lonliness, and Brene Brown at Houston in her Braving the Wilderness, say that it is all about making connection,  that Rousseau was right when he said, in modern parlance, that our DNA wires us  to be wanted and to belong, that connection’s core is believing in ourselves, that believing in ourselves means we must be authentic, and that being authentic means we can both belong and stand up alone at the same time.   Once John asked me how he could get out of his resigned malaise, how he could molt into a new and comfortable skin.  Remember, I have always said that I never give ‘you have to do’ advice.  I don’t because I don’t know anyone’s the entire story with its own set of unique experiences.  At best, I can read a sentence, hear paragraph, see a page, or, if I am lucky, take in a chapter.  But, never the entire story.  So, I answered him, as I have done with others, with a ‘this is what I did’ by telling him about my own experiences and the insight I drew from them: my family background as a second son that left me with an inner impovishment caused by a sense of not belonging in my family; about my consequent less than stellar student experiences; about being an outdider and of my need to belong which created an inauthenticity by being and doing what was expected of me by others; and about how I always felt  I was on the outside looking in.  Then, came my epiphany in 1991, followed by my successful dealing with cancer in 2005, and then followed by my survival of a massive cerebral hemorrhage in 2007, each of which took me to a crossroads.  I would tell them how I daringly used them to pull out the sapping tapeworm of weak self-esteem, weak self-confidence, and a host of other depreciating ‘selfs;’ how I drew on them to consciously understand my own story; how I made them into constant nudges that altered and keep altering the theme of my life in a positive direction; how I began more and more to speak truth to my own bullshit and that around me with a muscular empathy and civility;  how each one closed the gap between who I was and who I wanted to become; and how I reconfigured myself by changing the source of my joy and happiness and meaning.  I told him that all these experiences had the impact of raising my ’thought energy,’  an energy that was determined only by whatever I thought, that determined as much or as little drive I had, that determine what path I would take, and that drew on faith, hope, and love of myself as powerful strategies to defeat the crippling enemy of disbelief and fear.  ’They are,’ I once said to him, ‘my own form of constantly “thinking naked.”’  That’s all I said, and left him to raise the level and intensity of his own ‘thought energy,’ find his own strength and courage to understand his own story in order to nudge himself in the direction of his own answers and find the way to his own growth.”

“Sure, I asked a leading question now and then.  Sure, I made a supporting and encouraging comment here and there.  Sure, I shared by own ‘been there.’  Sure, I used the power of turning a life around, in the spirit of Leo Buscaglia, of a soft touch on his shoulder, an admiring smile directed at him, and a host of other small caring gestures and words.  But, I never, offer, offered, a prescribed “You must do this” remedy as an answer.   I was all about inspiration, not motivation.  That was for him to do:  to be inspired with a ‘I want to see in myself what he sees’ to motivate himself.  That’s the only true way a person can find lasting and continuing growth and change.  You know, that’s the true meaning of that adage that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.  All we can do is put salt in the horse’s oats to make him thirsty.  The salt I added is respectfully listening, sincerely believing, having deep faith and hope, and always, unfaltering loving.”

“I think the most meaningful words John ever spoke to me were at the end of our conversation on that sidewalk, ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘for just being there.’  And, I knew at that moment that he was continuing on his own journey of self-discovery.  Can anyone question why I flew with the wings of Mercury on the rest of my walk and why after all these past two months have yet to alight?”

Louis