All In

When Nora and I go down to NYC through New Jersey, there's one particular stretch of highway that's elevated about forty feet above ground, is five lanes across, and has an entrance or exit every quarter mile, so that the right half of the road is a constant merge.  Don't ask me which highway; I'm too busy avoiding buses and delivery trucks to know what the name of the road is.

Anyway, there's some furniture store along the side of this elevated highway, and its name is painted on the upper end of the six-story warehouse.  But what I remember most is the sign hung next to the subsequent exit, which says "You've Just Missed the Exit for Williams Mattress Warehouse!"

Well, thanks for the news.  I'm going 40 miles an hour wedged in between a Peter Pan bus, a produce truck, a taxi and a station wagon whose driver is texting and drinking a Big Gulp at the same time, and you're going to scold me for missing your exit?

I was reminded of this when I got a call from one of my colleagues this morning.  We were talking about how the new curriculum satisfies no one fully; the design media instructors all want more design media content, my colleague in history and theory wants more courses in design history, the studio heads all want nothing but studio, the head of Practice feels like hands-on learning is marginalized, and I of course bemoan the lack of liberal education in a professional school context.  I said that the only way we could really fulfill everyone's desires would be to make the curriculum five times as long, so that students would start when they were 18 and graduate when they were 35.  He replied that he only wanted to teach students when they were between 21 and 22, and then again when they were between 30 and 32.  "There's research to show that a lot of learning and growth takes place during those two periods."

Given that he and I have already gone past both of those exits, I said, "Do you think there's another one like that during your 50's?"

"I sure hope so."

I actually used both of those earlier exits at their appropriate times. At 21, I'd dropped out of college and was learning independence; at 31, I started a doctoral program.  In both cases, I committed to something I had never done before and had no empirical evidence that I could do, and I left myself no alternatives.  I didn't do them with one foot in and the other out; I was all in.  I was stretched to do things I hadn't even imagined possible, and proved myself capable.  And it was fun, both times.

I think that home in Vermont is the next exit.  I now belong to a place in a way that I haven't ever allowed myself to belong anywhere else.  Do I have the courage to go all in?  It's worked twice before...