1 minute read
Presidentelect’sColumncontinued...
lives, how it happens, and what we do with it is where the learning exists, and that learning is “the point” in life. By providing our students with avenues for listening deep inside and for processing emotions and thoughts, we are providing them the most powerful tools for the most powerful learning.
To recapitulate, we are who we are as a group because we are who we are as individuals. We are who we are as individuals because of the choices we make on a daily basis. We weren’t born this way, nor did we graduate from college and enter the profession this way—we became this way over time and through interactions, the dialectic process of experience-and-change, making choices guided by the voices and examples given to us by the mentors and teachers of our own pasts. We are the living history of music.
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I leave you with a quote given to me years ago by Dan Bukvich. Somebody gave it to him. It hangs outside his office door, and now it also hangs on mine, simply because this is exactly what we do:
“If a violin string is lying on a table loose and detached from any violin, some might suppose it ‘free’ because it is unconstrained. But what, one should ask oneself, is it ‘free’ to do or to be? Certainly it cannot vibrate with beautiful music in such a condition of limpness. Yet if you just fasten one end of it to the tailpiece of the violin and the other to a peg in the scroll, then tighten it to its allotted pitch, you have rendered it free to play. And you might say that spiritually the string has been liberated by being tied tightly at both ends. For this is one of the great paradoxes of the world to be seen and tested on every side:
The principle of emancipation by discipline.” Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life, Explorations into Science and Philosophy
Other random thoughts to pursue on your own:
• How many consecutive first-place trophies did Socrates’ debate team win?
• True or false: People began to follow Buddha in order to go to Disneyland every other year.
• We are what we win.
• Jesus’ disciples all got automatic A’s just for signing up.
