Word: mindful
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Such distinctions, however, are precisely those which ought to be made. A proper liberal-arts education, the kind which Harvard still prides itself on offering, should cultivate in its students an appreciation for and dedication to the life of the mind. Traditionally understood, this implies not a ravenous appetite for promiscuous knowledge regarding all sorts of curiosities and trivialities, but rather the pursuit of truth and the contemplation of beauty. The liberal arts were those studies befitting the liber, a free man—one free not only from physical enslavement but also the more debilitating and servile subjection...
...been trained to do. Kids these days, up on their Pynchon and following “The Wire,” think of the world as studded with allusions, teeming with hidden meanings. We lap up explanations and cure-alls; we accept the experts’ forecasts (never mind that they got us here); we tape on our rose-tinted glasses, cross our fingers, squeeze our eyes shut, and hope with all our hearts for change—the kind we can really believe in. That’s faith, real faith, and it’s being practiced...
...believe it fitting to start at another time—1969—a time as unknown to us graduates as the uncharted waters beyond our Commencement. That year, change was in the air, Nixon was in the White House, and Vietnam was on everyone’s mind...
When we maintain that thinking is craftwork, we reflexively maintain that craftwork is thinking. I spent eighty hours of my Senior Week cleaning dorms, an undertaking that prompted more than a few people to ask whether I was out of my mind. I suspect this question would have been less frequently asked had I spent those eighty hours peering at nucleotides or penning sonnets. And yet for all my sterling-grade education, I cannot see a meaningful difference between any of these things...
...time I reached Harvard, I had learned how to sit relatively still for an hour and to reduce others’ thoughts to halfway comprehensible scribbles.[no paragraph break here] Part of the trick to remaining sane while sitting still for so long is to allow the mind to wander invisibly. At best, it wanders to a place where the lecturer’s ideas are tested and challenged, which means that one has also missed ten minutes of the ongoing lecture. At worst, the mind simply counts the minutes until class is over. There is never a guarantee that...