Thanks to a wonderful response to the blog so far, and answering a suggestion of some readers, starting this week I will post twice weekly: Wednesday and Saturday. I deeply appreciate everyone’s kindness for reading these thoughts and to those, especially, who made suggestions and left comments. I truly hope this space can be one where many feel free to share their thoughts, hopes, knowledge, wisdom, and experience.
Engagement
I want to briefly discuss two kinds of important experiences for education: engagement with work or creative activity, and engagement with others or social engagement.
Engagement with work is what many artists and creative people experience. It is also intrinsic to competitive sports. But anyone can experience it if one feels a sense of being attuned to one’s activity. Engagement is a higher state of energy than normal and here one experiences his or her own self-directed transformation. In higher states of energy, one’s being is more integrated, the work is more coherent, and inspiration flows, so transformation can be more self-directed.
Work is educative in that it is a place where we can pour forth ourselves. The best work is felt as a calling. The Bahá’í Writings say: “The best of men are they that earn their livelihood by their calling.” Our innate gifts, what the Bible and psychology calls our “talents”, can point us in the general direction of our calling. But the individual calling is a calling to vocation. It “educes” us, for the first half of a “calling” is one’s inner potential calling out for fulfillment. When a calling is discovered or revealed we respond, often involuntarily, with something like: “That’s what I want to do!” That thrill we feel is because a profound reciprocal spiritual relation is now made conscious. We are now connected with something greater than ourselves. This connection releases tremendous energy and connects the heart and mind with hidden springs of life. I believe such connections are part of the universe waiting to be made manifest: like water and thirst. In one of his poems, the Persian poet Rumi beautifully described the sensation of thirst as “water calling to you.” The felt call to vocation is the connecting answer. How much we accomplish is partly up to us, but I like what Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “Every calling is great when greatly pursued.”
What comes out of oneself is one’s education, for the word education means “to bring forth.” What is put into real work is oneself. Work is the receptacle of self and a shaper of the public self—often the first question an American asks a new acquaintance is: “What do you do?” Work is a great source of joy if one is engaged: mere drudgery if not. To be joyful and meaningful, work must be intrinsically rewarding. And when work is intrinsically rewarding it is closer to a child’s play.
People do not just seek engagement with work, but also with each other. We yearn for connectedness on many levels. If connectedness with work and others is simultaneous, as in good project-groups, energy is almost limitless. We are, as one important document put it, literally Hardwired to Connect.(Check this out!)
Connectedness is fueled by the essential need to both give and receive love. Love and acceptance come naturally to the human heart. Children do not need to learn to love, though they must learn appropriate expressions of love, but they absolutely must be taught to hate.
Most people have experienced engagement and connectedness at some time. Psychologists call that sense of engagement “flow” and athletes “being in a zone.” In the heightened experience of engagement, time often seems to slow, the senses sharpen, both colors and moods are clearer, the world seems to glow and pulsate with life--it feels wonderful—like being in love, for that is what it is! The downside of engagement comes when it is sought for its own sake or because we are addicted to feeling good--in love with being in love. If he loses inspiration the creative person will often seek it in pleasure or some other compulsion to keep good feelings going.
Of course, one doesn’t want to come down. But it is inevitable that it occurs. Yet, it just here, on the downswing, that the meaningful or purposeful experience, in school, at work, or in social interaction, can keep the spirit moving ahead. Having a purpose makes work, education and life meaningful.
On Saturday’s post I want to fulfill the promise of specific examples of engagement in education. Next week I will present some thoughts on meaningful experiences.
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