In the Half-Light
There is a favorite line at the end of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs. Through It where Robert Redford as the narrator talks of the aging of the protagonist, Norman. He references him as a fly fisherman who is too old to fish the big waters of the rivers around Missoula. Montana, but does so anyway. He does it in the half-light of the canyon. Half-light is a wondrous term that implies that we are somewhere in between in life. Somewhat in the light and somewhat in the darkness. Much of our lives is actually spent in the half-light so it should not be a strange concept to us, but there is no denying that it feels strange when it is upon us. It is a ponderous time when we are often unclear about where to go from here. This morning, as I look out of the palladium window of the kitchen here at Homeward Bound, a kitchen I conceived and built and a palladium window I imagined and installed those many twenty-six years ago, I am looking into a half-light. The backyard here is dominated by two large willow trees that technically stand on the grounds of the University golf course’s ninth hole. They serve to frame the backyard and create a nice balance between the strength of large trees with the soft and suppleness of the bending willow.
As I sit here, the sun comes out and floods through the willows and into the kitchen through that palladium window. It highlights the streaks on the glass and it brightens the mood in the kitchen, which is set with breakfast pastries that I have gone out and purchased for my two lovely granddaughters. They like starting their days with chocolate croissants, and I am glad to be able to give them a moment of pleasure before they have to start their busy summer days. Charlotte must practice her lacrosse, which she will be playing for the first time this Fall. Evelyn is off to soccer camp, which she is enjoying since she has never played it before and it is both active and social. I have several chores to complete today. There are some additional boxes to ship back home. There are bags and boxes of items to take to the Ithaca ReUse center to be given away for others to make use of. And there are bags of recyclables and garbage to be taken to the Ithaca Recycling Center. Now that I think about it, the life of stuff (or maybe its the stuff of life?) seems to move gradually from being boxed to being bagged. You want to stay as close to being boxed as you can for as long as you can and avoid going into the bag.
I also have a call with a company that promotes a tech service of some sort that is a teaching aide of some sort that has the approval of the University of San Diego. I will listen to what they say and determine if it can be of help to me or my students as I teach this Fall and beyond. I am a bit in a quandary about teaching at the moment because I am scheduled to teach two courses this Fall and I am working off extremely high praise in the evaluations of one of the courses and very fair to middling commentary about the other. I am disappointed not to have been better received in the one course for my efforts since it is the softer of the two courses and about business ethics. I really thought I had nailed it based on the high level of class participation I experienced. That was apparently a false tell and I am forced to rethink my methods to try to find a place of improvement. I am already wondering how long I want to teach and especially teach the same material and getting bad or mediocre reviews helps drive the decision towards a negative path. I want to fight that tendency and try to improve enough to get the evaluations to a more positive light. Being in the performance half-light is simply no fun.
Strangely enough, the other chore I have to accommodate today is to meet with a man from the City of Ithaca, who will come by to discuss taking my stone and copper Socrates statue from the back yard to have it placed somewhere along the walking paths of the City as a piece of outdoor civic art. Socrates was a Greek philosopher who founded Western Philosophy as a discipline and focused on the ethical traditions of thought. He is a strange fellow who wrote no books but is known as the teacher of Plato, and thus a wise man who used discourse as his means of teaching. Hence, we have the Socratic Method of questioning and dialogue with students. The enigma was further enhanced by his being accused and tried for impiety and the corruption of youth. He was sentenced to death and yet refused offers to help him escape. He died in prison after he drank hemlock.
How prophetic to be spending my day determining the fate of Socrates after years of him standing guard over Homeward Bound and reminding everyone who comes that we are in the midst of an institution dedicated to educating the next generation of great minds. This same day I am pondering how best to improve my teaching of ethics to the next generation of business leaders. There are moments when I just want to take academic hemlock and stop teaching rather than fight to improve, but I sense that is not the right path to take even though it seems like the easy path. Instead, I will listen to all the criticisms and work to improve the curriculum and methods to create a better learning environment. Unlike other teaching experiences for which I have received strong acclaim, ethics is not about passing of specific information or data, but rather about providing a forum for learning and discussion that will gently guide students to a place of awareness of what they may face in their business careers.
As my sweet Charlotte and Evelyn go off to engage the world through lacrosse and soccer (Evelyn sporting shin guards, cleats and a league t-shirt), I am venturing forth to settle the affairs of my stuff of life and to figure out how best to use what I have learned about right and wrong to give something worthwhile back to the students of the University of San Diego.
Very little of life is clear cut. Managing ambiguity may be the best way to describe where we spend the bulk of our lives. That ambiguity is perhaps best described as being in the half-light and the trick might just be to focus on the light and stay away from the darkness. And a river runs through it.