Ch.6-Travel as HSing & Ch.7-Taste & See: family dinner as HSing

p125...Travel, as opposed to tourism, puts things in a new light, & I think what we saw in Florence did that for Billy.

p128...I was delighted to see him growing more cautious & skeptical about what he heard, especially when he heard it from someone in apparent authority. I think that is fundamental to a good education. And if it comes back to bite me from time to time, that's price worth paying.

p139...Yet our way of traveling is our way of living. We are constantly traveling, even when we are standing still. We see our lives as a movement from one present moment to another. Each moment is a time & place we are passing through & will never pass through again. Each moment is precious & unique..... We don't put our travel in the hands of tour organizers for the same reason that we don't put their education in the hands of schoolteachers. Discovery should be part of education, & of travel, but it is seldom part of tours or schools.

p140...But that's because so many people close their eyes to things around them. So few know how to travel without going away. There are places that any local with an exit leaves to go somewhere interesting, somewhere exciting.

p142..."Lost" isn't really the right word, though, because every place we go becomes our destination when we arrive. It's getting off the main road, & wandering around the back roads through unplanned detours, that opens our eyes to the country.

p161...The displine was less arduous now, & Br. Raphael was wearing civilan clothes, a work shirt & a baseball cap. Birds were making noise all around us. I asked him what he had learned after all of those years in the monastery, & he said, "I have learned that whatever I read about in the paper, I could do. You know, you pick up a paper, & you see some guy going to jail for someting, maybe he killed somebody, or robbed somebody. I could have done that. If it hadn't been for the advantages I had, the advantage of a good family, or the right mentor, or the right perosn to say something at the right time-- that could have been me. I'm no better, no different."

p163...Education is not just about learning facts & techniques. It's about learning a way of life. Would it be a digression to mention here Mother Teresa & her sisters....who came into our lives about the time that we began to HS? ....When you live on one inconstant income in a marginal city, it helps to have the example of the Missionaries of Charity. It is not that they are poor but that they are joyful because and by means of being poor. They are a sign of contradiction to a society that regards poverty to be a punishment for laziness, instead of a virtue & a blessing. Martine was closer to the sisters than she would take credit for being. .........To rely on a saint for an example is not to do exactly what a saint has done. As we see it, education means grasping the spirit of the saints, & living it in teh distinct circumstances of the present moment.

p164...But the following, adapted from Ascent of Mount Carmel, Chapter XIII, by St. John of the Cross, hangs on a bookshelf here:

ALWAYS STRIVE TO CHOOSE:
The hardest instead of the easiest
The unpleasant instead of the pleasant
The least instead of the most
The worst instead of the best
To desire nothing instead of any desire...

We find that those words summarize succinctly & usefully what practice is necessary for an education that aims at becoming fully free & fully human....Within the context of being Allah's 'abd, how do we become fully free & fully human? Within Islam, do we strive to choose these things? We are instructed to choose what is the most hopeful and the best in every situation....does that apply here or am I missing a point?

p166....The Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu tells of a wheelmaker who saw a duke reading the sages, & commented that he was reading "scum". The duke replied that the wheelmaker would die if he couldn't explain that comment to satisfactorily. The wheelmaker explained that the secret to making a wheel was to know how to cut. Cut too fast, & the cut would not be deep enuf. Cut too slowly, & it was almost uselss, though. Knowing how to balance fast & slow, deep & steady was something that came only fromexperience. He could not even tell his own son the secret, & he supposed the same was true of the sages-- everything really necessary & useful to know had died with them, & the rest, the scum, remained in books. The wheelmaker lived.

The understanding of what it really means to be human is similarly elusive, because in order to have it one must live it. If you live it, you don't need words; if you don't live it, words can perversely obscure rather than clarify it, make it harder rather than easier to grasp.