Former Honors Director Sandy Mack is Back to Discuss Honors Ideas

Beep…beep-beep…beeeeep: a faint signal to that deeply disturbed group of Honors students who came through Campus between, say, 1992 and 2006.  The ones who might faintly remember, if they listen real hard, Honors Sermons past…like a 23 watt the signal from Voyager I just before it left the heliosphere. Actually, I’m beeping all Honors students, from the days of Papa Portz (if the bifocals work) to those of Happy Howarth.  Some of you are Parssinens, Boydians, Lawrencians, Thornians, or bright-as-new-minted-pennies, Dorlanders.  All of you, all of us, like that Voyager miracle, flying far off stunningly alone in splendidly different directions, often unanticipated or unimaginable when you got things like an Honors Citation.  And yet we all share a connection to people and ideas we encountered while taking Honors seminars in College Park—even when that feels 7 billion miles away. 

They were right, weren’t they? Those few teachers who while filling our heads with facts in high school and college said that the facts weren’t what mattered…most, or much at all?  Everyone else was trying to reassure us that we were smart, hardworking, educated, and therefore safe. If we worked hard, “built a good foundation,” and made wise choices, our lives would unwind like smooth silk off a spool and we would serenely make our way along Adult Avenue to Success and Accomplishment until…. But even our best teachers, who tried to prepare us for the sheer length and arbitrariness of life, never let us in on the secret they must have known, being smart and old and all: that there is no safe, that we must and do prepare around the edges, but that life, with its all glories, pains, and above all hulking reality will get to us “irregardless.”  In our hearts we sorta knew they were not telling it straight, given the complexities, ambiguities, changes, and unpredictability we had seen around us ever since we lost that first boy friend or girl friend, noticed that even our parents were capable of hypocrisy, or found ourselves—smart, hardworking, educated us!—noticing how much of our own lives and energy we were managing to spend on things somewhat less noble and enlightened than what our better angels told us to be and to do.

Now here we all are, in the Middle Way, with some moments we are proud of, some decisions we celebrate, some memories that make our skin crawl, and, above all, the beginnings of a deep understanding of just how much our lives are constructed things.  If we are folks of faith, we’ve probably come to see how much work faith takes, and how dangerous it is if we flaunt our faith and ignore the spiritual work of love it is supposed to sponsor.  If we do not believe that a book or a tradition has already provided the answers to life’s deepest questions, we’ve probably come to see how much work it takes to hold on to and modify our deepest human commitments, protecting them from the lies of the Man, from the seductions of the Bad, and from the thousand natural shocks that life is heir to.

Whether we are “realists” who believe deep down that not much is going to change, and our best path is to strive for what’s just above us, lest we succumb to what’s all around us, and sink to what’s way beneath us (William Sloan Coffin); or whether we are “romantics” who still believe in the informing and transformative power of the right word, goal, or act of love (I do)—either way it all has a different feel to it, doesn’t it, as we round out our first decade out of college.  Or our second…or our third.  Or if you are me, my fifth.  Almost nobody told us just how long life would feel, day by week by month by year by decade.  We laughed with Woody Allen’s “85% of success is showing up.”  Increasingly that seems like most of what we know on earth or are like to know.  Committed realist or idealistic romantic—showing up alert, sane, and compassionate seems more and more to be at least Woody’s 85%, maybe more. 

It’s thrilling—because there is almost always room for change, adjustment, repentance, improvement, ecstasy, magic.  It’s exhausting—because we never seem to outgrow the need to grow, fail, learn, and try again. 

Many of those tidy answers and some of that easy confidence we had, and those easy plateaus we may have expected have faded.   But we all have a special kind of unearned wisdom that almost none of us had as first year students: the wisdom of perspective, survival, having found a way to put one foot in front of the other without embarrassing ourselves totally, damaging others irrevocably, falling prey to arrogance or despair (which may be siblings, or at least cousins).  As first year students almost all of us assumed, still, that They had answers, and they would tell them to us, soon, surely before we graduated.  Indeed, when I encountered a first year student who did not believe that, I was always alert to the possibility that he or she had been forced by life to grow up too early.  During our four (or five…or six) years at UM, we moved from (potentially) smart kids to (very) young adults. Teaching English 205 (Baby Shakespeare) was like talking with my kids; teaching English 405 (Advanced Shakespeare) was like talking with my wife.  A huge change over a few short years!

And the years, the decades, have—without our effort—added to our wisdom simply by our seeing how years pass, how compromises get made, how stands get taken and won, or lost, how life goes on.  Nobody gets out alive; nobody remains unscarred.  Just by existing, not to mention by having some boring victories and some glorious defeats, we all know things we didn’t know as first year students. 

And now Honors wants us all to help them find ways—10,000 different ones—we can use that unearned wisdom to create a circle that includes all past Honors students—you!—and the current crops starting off enthusiastically and blindly each year.  You ready to help?  You got ideas?  Let’s hear ‘em.  Soon.  Right this second, before you put it on a list and forget to do it.   E-mail Sandy Mack You listenin’ to me, kid?  Beep…beep-beep…beeeep. 

Sandy (Maynard) Mack, director of University Honors, 1994-2004