On Founder’s Week, I thought I would reflect on St. Josemaria’s words: “Humility is truth on the road of the ascetical struggle.” What does it mean to say humility is the truth? So many things. For sure it means acknowledging the things you’re not good at and accepting negative feedback gracefully. But it also means not pretending you’re worse than you really are. You should be ready to put up your hand and offer yourself to serve if you are really good at something. Why deny everyone better service because you’re afraid of being proud? Accept the truth about the gift that you have been given, declare it, use it…then remember not to let it go to your head.

As we tried to push through the pain barrier in the last few kilometres of the VC Run, Tuzo Munene our alumnus and my pacer turned psychologist started saying stuff like “Give me three kilometres. Just three good ones. Dig deep! This is the moment to remind yourself of all those needy students you’re doing this for. You’ve got this!”

Runners typically motivate each other at tough moments with the words “Dig deep.” It’s because deep inside each of us, there is always a reserve of strength we can tap into. Just when we think we can’t take any more pain and we’ve nothing more to give, the right motivation can give us access to that secret reserve. If we had to save someone’s life, we would pierce through that pain barrier and somehow use that hidden strength. The motivation has to be big, and in my experience, when you’re doing things for something bigger than yourself, that is when you’re most likely to succeed in summoning that untapped energy.

After I had given a career talk, a student came to me and said:
“Hearing you speak about realizing our potential of becoming high flyers and having a tremendous impact left me wondering whether my dreams are valid. Is it okay that what I want most in life is a happy marriage and a beautiful family? Would I be a let-down and a failure if I chose to be a homemaker instead of joining the rat race and competing with others?”

I, of course, validated her vision, which is more consistent with my deep appreciation and gratitude to the millions of women who go unnoticed because they chose a quieter life, away from the limelight but still deeply meaningful.

Such a life may have fewer direct touchpoints with mainstream society, but that doesn’t lessen how far it can go in terms of the depth of personal experience and growth. So if we set ourselves free of value systems that have come to be widely accepted in how they define success (mostly as career advancement, becoming wealthy and famous), and reclaim the power to prioritize goods differently, we regain the freedom to choose whether to sacrifice all for one’s career or to sacrifice one’s career for one’s family, or whether to seek a middle ground.

From a psychological standpoint, if you match your decisions and actions with your expectations, you should find happiness, at least in the short term. And a mismatch should lead to dissatisfaction. But what if you seek long-term contentment? To find that, you would need to break out of the Psychological framework I’ve described and jump into the world of Philosophy. You would need to ask yourself philosophical questions like: are all goods equal in value? If not, then who or what determines which ones are more important than others? Is this just a subjective choice, where I ultimately decide what’s important to me and what’s not, or are there objective values to guide me, or is it a negotiation between subjectivity and objectivity?

False feedback, broken record experience.
I was attending a town hall online from Gort Ard in Salthill, Galway. While at it, Zoom just let me know my Internet is unstable, so I know that the weird way in which Stephen seems to be speaking is an entire artefact of my poor Internet.

In other words, the worse the defects on my end, the worse he seems to come across…

One can harness the force of wind, no matter what direction it is blowing, to propel a ship forward.

Two insights. Harnessing adversity (psychology) and harnessing forces of nature (Physics).

Good example is harnessing gravity through its work on water. The greater the drop of water the more the electricity that can be harnessed from it. Gravity is pretty powerful, and amazingly it is all around us, readily available to be harnessed so to speak if we can only figure out how to tap it. How can we do that better?

Imagine how much force is available for us to play with, be it the earth’s own gravitational force, the earth’s orbital force drawn by the sun, just depending on our ability to tap it or harness it. Then if we add the principle of leverage, imagine how much more force we could bring to bear in objects of our choice…far greater than the forces we are tapping.

Kudos to those who managed to tap into nuclear forces, harnessing something so apparently small and invisible yet so powerful…