As this academic year winds down, I would like to say,
“Thank you.” Thank you for your diligence
in watching over your grades. Thank you
for recognizing that you are part of a National Academic Team. Thank you for dedicating or re-dedicating
yourself to this program.
I know many of you want to ask the question, “Has Upward
Bound been refunded?” I wish I had an
answer. We have not heard. Our office probably won’t hear until after
Summer Component 2012 is completed.
Worst case scenario is that we won’t hear until after school starts.
I will ask you to remember this
quote: Yesterday is history; tomorrow is
a mystery; today is a gift … that’s why it’s called the present.
Go
forward, be brilliant. Work hard, be
kind and amazing things will happen.
Summer Component 2012 is shaping up to be “The Best Summer Ever.” But
it takes your attitude to make it “the best summer ever.” Your attitude is reflected in a high and rare
level of happiness. This level goes by many names: excellence, meaning and fulfillment. It
involves doing things that are painful. It involves doing things that sometimes
costs you friends. It involves achieving some large thing for the world.
The
route to this kind of excellence was described by Clay Christensen. When he
graduated from college, Christensen decided that his most important immediate
task was to find a purpose for his life. He was enrolled at a program at Oxford
but he took off an hour each day studying, praying and thinking about his
purpose. The program was very demanding, but each evening, no matter what, he
took an hour off from his work to find his purpose.
He
calls that enterprise the single most useful thing he’s ever done. Since he
defined his purpose, he has allocated his time and energy in order to serve it.
If you don’t have a purpose, you are sailing without a guiding star, he says.
You’ll just wander aimlessly. You’ll spend too much time on things that give
you an immediate sense of accomplishment, like completing a project at work,
and neglect the deeper challenges that take longer to realize, like raising
honorable children.
Christensen describes his method: First,
identify a goal. Then devise a strategy. Then
find the right metrics to measure your progress. Then execute your plan. I’ve
never been able to follow his method. I was not able at age 20 or 25 to sit
down and think, pray and research and find a purpose for my life. In fact, I
don’t think most of us are able to achieve this hard task in this way. I do not
believe most of us are able, as we set out in life, to understand the
circumstances in which our life will be lived. The world is too dynamic,
unpredictable and unknowable.
I
don’t know if I can express this adequately, but I don’t believe that we fully
exist until our story is well under way. That is, I don’t believe we are people
who then form relationships and set off on journeys through life. I think the
journeys and the relationships come first and our personhood emerges slowly
over decades out of them. President
Lyndon Baines Johnson, founder of this program, wrote in 1965:
There
are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to
a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization
that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to
build a great society. Those who came to this land sought to build more than
just a new country. They sought a new world. You can make their vision our
reality. Let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will
look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the
exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.
Regardless of what happens to our Upward Bound status, I
urge you to go forward and shine!
Diane J. Gardner
Upward Bound,
Director
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