Tag: time

Death and Taxes and a Meaningful Life

The certainty of death and taxes, famously noted by Benjamin Franklin, is challenged by modern realities. Wealth disparities skew tax compliance, while transhumanists envision overcoming mortality. Authors Burkeman and Beal argue that confronting our finitude enriches lives. Ultimately, recognizing life’s limits prompts meaningful existence and societal responsibility.

a close up shot of dollar bills
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Nothing is certain except for death and taxes.

When Benjamin Franklin popularized this saying in 1789, he was referring to the new American Constitution, which he believed shouldn’t be considered certain or permanent, at least not without the active participation and vigilance of its citizens—a republic, he suggested, if we can keep it. Absolutely nothing is certain—not even the bedrock of our nation’s democracy—except for death and taxes.

And maybe not even those.

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Vocational Calendars and Teaching the Giftedness of Time

The author reflects on the challenges faced in advising for students, noting a disconnect between student expectations and meaningful discussions about their futures. Drawing from Rowan Williams’s ideas on the significance of time, the author advocates for teaching students to appreciate time’s giftedness, aligning academic rhythms with their religious calendars and broader vocational paths.

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I have just finished a round of appointments with many of my first-year students and undeclared advisees to help them review their progress and pick classes for next semester. Even as I am blessed with students who are polite, eager, and diligent, some of their expectations create obstacles to having more meaningful conversations about their vocational arc. They often want to prioritize a more convenient, linear pathway—one aimed at a credential they are just beginning to understand. I would prefer to spend time with them discussing a more holistic trajectory: how they prepared in the past for their lives as students, what they are exploring in this present moment, and how they are creating foundations for their futures. Given this tension, this most recent round of advising conversations felt to me like boilerplate sessions of prescriptive compliance.

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Retirement as Rehearsal

Retirement shows you how finite your time is. If you stare retirement in the face long enough, then you can even see your death looking back at you. No wonder it can be hard to retire.

As a young academic hired into a largely older faculty in the mid-1990s, I watched certain colleagues become increasingly grouchy as they approached the final stage of their careers. Thirty years later, I get it: your sense of self, your vocation, the edifice that has housed your purpose and given your days and years meaning—all of it coming to an end. The conventional wisdom on this life phase invokes the perils of aimlessness and loss of identity as we step away from our work. Yet the research on the relationship between retirement and purpose is not all negative, and Hyrum W. Smith, the “father of time management,” urges “purposeful retirement.” Still, retirement shows you how finite your time is. If you stare retirement in the face long enough, then you can even see your death looking back at you. No wonder it can be hard to retire.

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Called to Endings

We cannot know the future. But to interpret our lives or to judge the best mode of action at any given moment requires us to consider that future—to imagine possible ends, to “project ourselves [. . .] past the End” like the poets.

During my graduate coursework in the late 1990s, Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction was revelatory for me. Published in 1966, it certainly wasn’t part of any hot, new direction in Victorian studies; it couldn’t even be described as canonical at the time. But it was vital for my own scholarly trajectory in its examination of our need for endings and how narratives play with temporality and shape our experiences both of reading and of living.

I’ve been thinking about endings a lot over the past year, prompted no doubt by the death of a parent and by my choosing to give up one of my administrative appointments, but also by our new realities in the post-pandemic academy. Perhaps it seems odd to consider endings just as we approach or anticipate the start of the new academic year—new classes, new students, new colleagues. But endings are bound up in beginnings, and to recognize their importance in our interpretive work brings vocational clarity. To begin anything is, paradoxically, to begin its ending.

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Can the Carnegie Hour Support the Vocation of Student Learning?

If Carnegie units of academic time are fundamental to defining a baccalaureate degree, then how can we make them work for us and for our students?

The Carnegie hour is a unit of time that standardizes academic study across institutions. Established in 1906 as means to calculate retirement hours earned, Carnegie hours are now often required on syllabi. This way, students (and accreditation agencies) know how many “instructor-led” class hours to expect and how many “independent student learning” homework hours to schedule.

Educators have been critical of standardized measures of academic time since these hours were instituted. Even Carnegie has called for their revision. Others counter that they are so embedded in how higher education measures, well, everything—student learning, academic terms, job descriptions, full-time faculty employment (FTEs), TIAA retirement earnings, national accreditation assessments—that untangling higher education from this constructed 50-minute “hour” is practically impossible.

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Slow School: The Gift of Liberal Education

Could the “slow food” movement find its partner in holistic, liberal arts education—what we might properly call “slow school”?

When I was a freshman in college, my first-year seminar professor was Dr. Ann Brady, a former-nun-turned-English-professor, who had flowing red hair and oversized eyeglasses, and who often lamented about the phlegm she would find in the English building’s drinking fountain. I came to know her as a joyful person, but she was no-nonsense in the classroom. Faced with 18-year-olds slouching in their chairs, asking questions about what would be on the midterm, Dr. Brady insisted that we read literature more slowly and with fewer concerns about what we were supposed to be getting out of it. “These books will take time,” she said. “You’ve got to be willing to waste time with them.”

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Vocation and the Folly of Time Management

In a recent episode of On Being, Krista Tippett talked with Oliver Burkeman about time, specifically all the ways that we try to organize time when we engage in the project of “time management.” Burkeman’s observations are a helpful reminder of something with which existentialists have wrestled for over a century.

What are we assuming about time when we consider our vocations or work to help students in discerning their callings?

The metaphors we use when we talk about time reveal some of those assumptions. In a recent episode of On Being, Krista Tippett talked with Oliver Burkeman about time, specifically all the ways that we try to organize time when we engage in the project of “time management.” It puts us into a very strange relationship with time. Burkeman’s observations are a helpful reminder of something with which existentialists have wrestled for over a century.

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Attention, Please: Attentiveness and Vocation

If we succumb to dwelling on the past or living for the future without remaining attentive to the present, we become disconnected from reality.

At the 2021 NetVUE UnConference, Willie James Jennings spoke of attention, or attentiveness, as fundamental to vocation, as the inner logic of calling. He advocated for cultivating students’ attentiveness to themselves, hearing their own voice, as well as of the world around them, hearing with new depth. On the following day, Paul Wadell and Charles Pinches, citing their book, Living Vocationally: The Journey of the Called Life, echoed: “The most basic calling is to pay attention.” Even more recently, Jason Stevens detailed a particular application of attentiveness within his first-year writing courses, quoting Wadell and Pinches at length.

Over the past several months, I’ve found myself coming to a similar conclusion, namely that attentiveness is more than a virtue—that it is, rather, the foundation of every vocational journey, individually and collectively. This conclusion took shape during the spring as I taught a new course exploring the impact and meaning of the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism as a lead-in to exploring the broader impact and meaning of pivotal moments for our vocational journeys. Building on several readings used in this course, as well as additional sources, this post is aimed at elaborating on the critical importance of attention and suggesting corresponding applications. 

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Vocation as stories we tell ourselves about ourselves

One way to think of vocation is as a type of story that we tell ourselves and others — a story that gives meaning to our lives and structures how illustration_at_title_a_in_just_so_stories_c1912we understand who we are and what we do. It makes sense of lives as we look backward and it guides our aspirations and choices as we look to the future. No surprise, then, that a number of recent contributions to this project have focused on this topic.1

Our identity, both to ourselves and to others, often takes the form of a story. When asked, “who are you?” our first reply is usually with a name–our story’s title, as it were.illustration_at_title_b_in_just_so_stories_c1912 But if pressed for more than a name, we narrate some part of our life (or our aspirations for life looking to the future, as when a student discusses her major). Our story is always selective; we touch on the “plot changes,” the “turning points,” the central roles we play, the crucial events or revelatory experiences that, to our minds, made us who we are. However brief or extensive, we are our stories.

 

Metaphors for understanding narrative identity

This narrative understanding of identity has borrowed useful metaphors from the study of narrative in literature. We speak of scripts, plots, and roles, and the improvisation that draws on the “repertoire” one has seen, acquired, and rehearsed. These metaphors can help us understand Continue reading “Vocation as stories we tell ourselves about ourselves”