15 May 2013
Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Listening to students at the end of the academic year runs the gamut between tragedy and comedy. One student confided in me that perhaps it would have been better if he had begun to study earlier than the night before and similar “confessions” revealed the basic truth that Benjamin Franklin wisely spoke when commented that “things that hurt, instruct.” And of course there is a lot of instruction that goes on at a University and not without some varying degree of pain.
One of the important lessons college students hopefully learn is that time goes faster than you think and that most things take much longer than you had planned. College life resembles life outside the university in that there are plenty of options and no possible way of choosing everyone in light of how many hours are in the day. Energy drinks are the silly allusion that you can cheat nature which in the end, never works. What does work is the establishment of values and making choices based on those values, letting other choices fall to the wayside in light of a greater good.
But that lesson seems to be one that always needs a refresher course, even for those of us who look back to our college years in decades, not simply years. Perhaps that is why St. Ignatius always was reminding us of the fundamental direction of our lives and the necessity to direct our choices in light of that direction.